by John Jakes
A ring of fire. Waiting to be ignited by order or mischance. As the sun sank, he felt a renewed, almost overwhelming pessimism.
That same evening Orry stepped off a river schooner at the Mont Royal landing. Twenty minutes later he joined Charles in the library.
“What’s the situation in Charleston?” the younger man asked as he poured two glasses of whiskey.
“Bad. Business is stagnating. The merchants are starting to squeal.”
“Are people leaving?”
“On the contrary. The city’s never seen so many tourists. But they’re spending only what they must. The same goes for the home folk.”
“Can’t say it surprises me. Who wants to throw money away when civil war may erupt any minute, and two weeks from now bread could cost twenty dollars a loaf?”
With a smile that was more of a grimace, Charles sank back into a chair and flung one leg over the side. His homecoming had been pleasant for a day or two, but very quickly that sense of enjoyment had left him. He and Orry had discussed Elkanah Bent at some length, and although few new facts were added to what Charles already knew, he was once again depressed by the magnitude of the man’s hate. Surely it would burn itself out if war erupted. In any case, he was reasonably certain their paths would never cross again.
Bent wasn’t the only cause of his malaise. He missed the West and, to his surprise, no longer felt entirely at home in his native state. He didn’t dare admit that he could think of but one antidote for his uneasiness: fighting.
“The news gets worse,” Orry remarked after sipping from his glass. “There is a considerable amount of bad feeling about the new government. When forming it, Davis appears to have ignored South Carolina.”
Charles digested that, then put the subject aside. He asked, “How is everyone at Tradd Street holding up?”
“Cooper’s doing as well as can be expected, considering that the cargo ship is now a lost cause and part of his land has been commandeered for another iron battery.”
“I gather it was a choice between consenting or facing the possibility of a mob burning down the yard. Judith and Brett are looking after Cooper, but he’s pretty despondent. His worst fears have been realized.”
“Did you see Ashton?”
“No. I’m told James is thick with Governor Pickens, and despite Montgomery’s evident disdain for South Carolinians, they say James is maneuvering for a post there. Oh, and one more thing—I have it on good authority that all these war preparations have left the state dead broke.”
“What about that seven-hundred-thousand-dollar loan they’re trying to place?”
“No takers.”
“Well, maybe things’ll veer back to normal somehow. Maybe the issue of the fort will be settled peaceably.”
“President Davis has said he’ll take Sumter by negotiation or he’ll take it by force. Lincoln will be inaugurated in a couple of weeks—perhaps then we’ll have some clue as to which it will be.”
The two former soldiers stared at one another in the darkening library, neither in doubt about the outcome that was wanted by those who were in control of the state.
Some forty-eight hours later, Huntoon was standing at the rail of the guard steamer Nina. He held a plate of chicken salad in one hand, a glass of Tokay in the other.
A party of thirty gentlemen had come aboard for this sunset cruise to inspect the disputed fort. On the afterdeck a buffet had been spread beneath a striped awning. The food had been prepared by a select committee of ladies, of which Ashton had contrived to become a prominent member. Half a dozen slaves from as many households had been ordered out to staff the serving area.
The wind blew briskly from the northeast, promising a chilly February night. As Huntoon munched away, Nina completed a turn in the main ship channel and put in toward the city, white water purling off her paddles.
“You know, Governor,” Huntoon remarked to the man standing next to him, “the lack of decisive action is becoming an irritant to many citizens.”
“My hands are tied,” Pickens retorted. “General Beauregard will be here soon, and as far as the interim is concerned, President Davis has let me know in unmistakable language that he is the one in charge, not I.”
“Hmmm.” Huntoon sipped his wine. “I thought the palmetto state seceded to preserve its sovereign rights. Have we already surrendered them to another central government?”
Pickens glanced over his shoulder, apprehensive about eavesdroppers. “I wouldn’t speak so loudly—or so critically. Not if you still hope to earn yourself a place in Montgomery.”
“I certainly do. It appears to me that men of principle and courage are sorely needed down there. We must force the issue.”
“James, you’re too precipitous,” the governor began, but the younger man immediately interrupted.
“Nonsense, sir. If we don’t act, others will. Yesterday I heard serious discussion of a new secession movement. Some influential planters in this state are talking of pulling away from the Davis government and petitioning Great Britain to make South Carolina a protectorate.”
“That’s preposterous,” Pickens exclaimed, but his voice had a nervous note in it. And with good reason. Lately, his friend and colleague in secession, Bob Rhett, had heard rumors of a reconstruction plan that Stephen Douglas was promoting in a last-ditch effort to save the Union. The governor wanted no part of lunatic schemes to establish a British colony, but neither did he want reconciliation.
“We must act with restraint for a while longer. The Davis emissaries will fail in Washington. By then Beauregard will be in place, and we’ll have our war.”
“I do hope so,” Huntoon murmured.
His attention was abruptly caught by the sight of an officer watching from Fort Sumter’s terreplein. He recognized Billy Hazard. He lifted his wineglass to salute him.
The Yankee upstart nodded with inattentive casualness. Huntoon found the response offensive. We’ll have our war, and you will be among its first casualties, he thought as the guard steamer chugged on toward the city piers.
60
THE HAND ON BRETT’S arm was bruising. The voice had the high, flat accent of the up-country.
“Here, my lass, all I asked was directions to—”
“Ask someone else.” She hauled off and drove the point of her shoe into the man’s shinbone.
He swore and called her a name. The odor of his whiskey breath fumed around her as she tore from his grip and fled down Meeting Street. The man, a burly young fellow in soiled clothes and a broad-brimmed wool hat, lurched after her.
Impelled by fear, she ran swiftly in the February dusk. She dashed to the right, into Tradd Street. Her pursuer yelled something about Charleston whores but came no farther than the corner.
A moment later she risked a look back. The man was moving across Meeting, a passing shadow among others. She shuddered.
Charleston was swarming with visitors from all parts of the South. They had come to sightsee, to watch the fuses of practice shells sketch red lines in the night sky, to listen to street-corner Ciceros denounce the awkward ape from Illinois, to marvel at the precise drill of the Citadel cadets, and to murmur over the gaudy colors and designs of the uniforms of the state military units.
Most of the visitors were still spending very little. And a lot were riffraff, like the young man from whom she had just fled. He had accosted her as she was hurrying home from the public market, where she had given a hamper of cheese, bread, candles, and matches to the shopping detail from Fort Sumter.
There, too, she had faced a measure of danger. She could still see the venomous faces and hear the epithets as she passed the hamper to a corporal. Traitor was the mildest name she had been called; most of the names were filthy.
“Mr. Rhett and his crowd are always railing against the Northern mobocracy,” she said to Judith after she was once more safe in the house. “I’d say we have our own mobocracy right here in Charleston.”
“Feeling seems to run high
er every day,” Judith agreed. She reached out to tap her sturdy son’s wrist. “Judah, don’t play in the oyster stew.”
But the boy continued to trail his spoon back and forth through the bowl. On the other side of the table, Marie-Louise fidgeted. “Mama, is Papa going to be gone again tonight?”
“Yes, he’s very busy these days.”
The eyes of Judith and Brett met briefly; both understood the lie just uttered. No business reasons compelled Cooper to linger on James Island after dark. Construction on the Star of Carolina had come to a halt weeks ago. Yet he went back to the yard day after day and stayed until midnight or later. Haggard and emaciated, he was behaving like some ghoulish spectator at the scene of a railway disaster, sifting through the wreckage in search of an explanation—as if explanation could undo the damage. Brett worried about her brother almost as much as she worried about Billy.
“Oh, you must see the New York Herald that Cooper brought home day before yesterday,” Judith exclaimed. “There’s a new play being performed there. It’s all about Fort Sumter. The paper gives the name of the actor who’s personating Lieutenant William Hazard.”’
“You mean the characters are named for real people?”
“I do. Anderson, Doubleday—they’re all in it.”
“Is that art or greed?”
“More the latter, I suspect,” Judith replied.
Brett sighed. How bizarre the city and the nation had become in only a matter of weeks. Little by little Americans had gotten mired in a kind of genteel madness in which very little was unthinkable. Worst of all, the madness threatened the young man she loved. Everyone said there would be war the moment Lincoln was inaugurated. Beauregard would give the command to the batteries, and the eighty men at Sumter would be killed by cannon fire or by the bayonets and musket balls of storming parties.
She had nightmares about that, nightmares about attending Billy’s funeral. She feared those dark dreams so much that she could hardly go to sleep these nights. Since leaving Mont Royal she had lost twelve pounds, and great circles of shadow ringed her eyes.
In the parlor she used sewing scissors to clip the item about the play. Two loud thuds in quick succession made her jump.
Mortars, she realized. The Mount Pleasant battery. She had gotten so she could identify the source of every practice round. She was not the only Charlestonian with that newfound talent.
As the booming echoes faded, she gave a small exclamation, discovering that as the mortars went off, the scissors had slipped. The point had pricked the fleshy part of her left palm, and she hadn’t even felt it. She watched a brilliant crimson drop ooze out and trickle toward her wrist. Another drop formed.
The sight of blood, coming hard upon the artillery fire and following the drunken manhandling on the street and the cursing at the market, shattered her emotional defenses. “Billy,” she whispered. Tears filled her eyes. “Billy.”
She pressed the bloodied hand to her mouth and fought to control her fear.
“You mean their damn President had to sneak into Washington?”
“Yessir. He was wearin’ cast-off clothes and so was his detective hireling, Pinkerton. They arrived on a sleeper in the middle of the night like common travelers. Like criminals!”
“Why’d Lincoln get off the regular train?”
“Feared a plot to assassinate him, they say. If I’d been close by, I might have lent a hand With—oh, evening, Mr. Main.”
“Gentlemen.”
With an expression of distaste, Cooper nodded at the men but did not tip his hat. The two were corporals in some state artillery unit that reported to the commander of the James Island forces, Major Evans.
Cooper had overheard the gloating conversation as he approached from the back of the shed the state authorities had constructed at the edge of his shipyard, having advised him in writing that the structure would be put up with or without his permission. Inside the shed stood a special ordnance furnace, its coals banked now. During a bombardment, the furnace would heat shot intended to start fires within Fort Sumter.
Churlish louts, Cooper thought as he stomped past the men and the shed. He coughed hard in the night damp. Out on Sumter a blue signal light was glowing. Looking at that, he wasn’t forced to look at the keelson of the unfinished vessel. It sat there in the thickening mist, a mockery of all his dreams for the South. Well, he was no different from Brunel in that respect. The little engineer had seen his dream demolished, too.
Cooper noticed lights in a mortar battery farther down the shore. He decided not to continue walking in that direction. He squatted and let handfuls of sandy loam slip through his fingers as he stared seaward into the mist.
He was faced with a decision. Secretary of the Navy Mallory had telegraphed from Montgomery to say he was sending two members of the Committee on Naval Affairs to call on Cooper. They would arrive in the morning. He knew what they wanted.
His warehouse. His yard. His ships.
He thought their new government misguided, its cause tragic. Why, then, did he agonize for even one instant over how he would answer the visitors? He knew the answer to that, too.
He agonized because loyalty to his state was tugging at him like an ocean tide, tugging with a power he had never thought possible. He hated that, but he was unable to stop it.
He rose and tramped back toward the shot furnace. His stomach growled. He recalled he hadn’t eaten since morning, when he had wolfed a slice of Judith’s fine dark bread. He was uninterested in eating, uninterested in anything except the decision that had him stretched on an emotional rack. What should he do?
No, that wasn’t precisely the question. Any man who professed to be sane should get out of the South while there was still time. He must rephrase it. What would he do?
He had only until morning to decide.
“Rex, what were you whispering about?” Ashton had been passing the pantry and had overheard the boy and the senior house man, Homer, conversing in a furtive, excited way.
The boy cringed away from his mistress. “Wasn’t whisperin’ about nothin’, Miz Huntoon.”
“Damn your nigger hide, I heard you. I distinctly heard the word Linkum.”
Rex gulped. “Linkum? No, ma’am, I swear I never—”
The pressure of Homer’s dark brown hand on his arm stopped him in mid-sentence. Homer, in his forties and stooped from years of toil, gazed at the boy with resigned eyes. “Won’t do no good to lie. Go harder with both of us if you keep on. Better just to swallow the medicine.”
He turned to Ashton, signifying his readiness to do what he had recommended to the youngster. But Rex was rebellious.
“No, Homer, I won’t—”
Homer’s crushing grip on his wrist made him cry out. Ashton’s breathing grew loud and raspy as she said, “Take down your breeches, both of you.”
Her hickory rod lay in its accustomed place in the kitchen. The cook and two house girls exchanged glances of alarm as the mistress rushed in, snatched the rod from the high shelf, and hurried out again.
Ashton felt compelled to nip this fascination with Lincoln before it grew to dangerous proportions. All over Charleston—all over the state, in fact—the slaves were stirring, whispering that one word—Linkum. Some who could read understood him to be the North’s new ruler. Few of the rest knew much of anything about him, beyond the fact that he was a Black Republican. But their masters hated Black Republicans so violently that Linkum clearly had to be the Negro’s friend.
In the pantry, Homer and Rex had dropped their trousers and faced the wall. Ashton ordered them to pull down their torn underdrawers as well. They were reluctant, but they obeyed. At the sight of the boy’s sleek, muscled flanks, Ashton felt a little internal spasm.
“Five apiece,” she said. “And if I ever again hear either of you utter the name of that rascally ape, you’ll get ten—or more. Who will take the punishment first?”
Homer, calmly: “I will, ma’am.”
Ashton’s breasts
felt tight within her dress. She was breathing fast. She saw Rex cast a swift, fearful look over his shoulder. “No, I think not,” she murmured, and swung the rod.
The whack was loud as a shot in the pantry. Rex hadn’t braced his palms on the wall firmly enough. His chin shot forward, and he got quite a bang. He yelped, then threw another look backward. A wild, resentful look; murderous, almost.
“Keep your eyes on the wall, nigger,” Ashton said. She struck him with all the force she could muster.
Homer clenched his right hand, leaned his head forward, and closed his eyes.
Afterward, she felt as if she had passed through a torrential storm into more tranquil air. She retired to her room and there lay dozing pleasurably on a chaise. Her limbs had a languorous heaviness.
In her imagination she reexperienced the punishment. At first she pictured it exactly as it had happened, feeling many of the accompanying sensations. Then she varied the images; it was no longer a black boy and a black man she whipped, but a cringing, whining Billy Hazard.
She and Forbes LaMotte were frustrated because Billy was bottled up at Sumter, never allowed to come into the city. But with General Beauregard due to arrive at any moment, there might be a change. The earlier attempt to have Billy mauled and injured had been foolish, she realized now. Of course she would prefer to squash Billy personally but she and Forbes would be content if he died in the fort.
Unconsciously, her hands slipped down below her waist. Sweat stippled her upper lip and forehead. She shut her eyes and watched the screen of her imagination display a new picture: Billy amid fire and crumbling stone. The South Carolina batteries blew Sumter to pieces around him. Slowly he sank from sight. Breathing hard, she pressed herself.
Let it come, she thought. O Lord, let it come soon.
She moaned softly. A sudden movement of her body jerked the chaise two inches to one side.
The Georgian toppled over. Forbes LaMotte sidestepped to permit his victim to fall past his legs. The man landed face down in the sand of the alley. Overhead, thunder drummed in the dark clouds of a March afternoon.