Kate stepped away from the wall but found her knees had gone rubbery, her head fuzzy. She had to put out a hand to steady herself.
She knew what stay in Charleston meant from her academic adviser: the door of her future in academics—all she knew how to do, all she’d made plans for, the only place she belonged—swinging shut.
The alleyway here that crossed East Bay Street shot a block toward the harbor and turned into a pier. Out over the water, the clouds had gained bulk. They muscled against a weak morning sun.
All up and down East Bay, palmettos stood straight and unbending, only their fronds clattering in the growing breeze. Yet the ground lurched underfoot, Kate was sure. Like she’d stopped somehow on a roundhouse, her whole life switching track and direction—and she was only on board to watch.
Kate bit her lip hard and was glad he could not see the tears welling up in her eyes. “I understand.”
“I am conducting research of my own in June not far from you, my needing to respond to some revisionist scholarly work—polysyllabic claptrap, but requiring a coherent response—on the siege at Fort Wagner, or where it once stood, on Morris Island, close to Charleston. I may be able to check in with you while I’m in the environs.”
She faced the harbor—into the wind. Rain began falling now in silvered streaks through the palmettos and glossed the cobblestones of the alley. Kate backed under the eaves of the shop Cypress & Fire. In the rain, the firm lines of the world—the brick of the buildings, the trunks of the palms—had all come unmoored and floated now in the mist that rose from the street and over the harbor.
“And, Ms. Drayton, at the risk of crossing professional boundaries, I feel I should add one more thing.”
She braced herself for one final blow.
“I am rooting for you. Whatever you may find there.”
She pressed her mouth into a line until she could trust herself to speak. “Thank you.”
From her jeans pocket, Kate tugged out the sketch she’d scribbled there on the seawall: the mansions, the buggy, the cannons, the ship. And the ropes that she’d drawn—the tendrils of moss hanging like so many nooses. All blurring now in the rain whipping under the eaves where she huddled.
“You know,” she said into her phone, “I’d not realized what it would be like coming back. It’s like somebody left a camera shutter open for two hundred years, like old sepia shots bleeding into the new.”
“That,” said Julian Ammons, “would be Charleston.”
Chapter 7
1822
Another gust shook the carriage, the horses shifting uneasily in their harness traces under the deluge, then stomping, brass rings jangling. Emily Pinckney pulled her skirts clear of the carriage’s wheel and its elliptical springs and ducked under the roof formed by the landau’s folding top. But mud from the horses’ rear hooves splattered the front of her dress, white silk suddenly speckled in brown.
The gentleman who reached to assist her bowed low. “My humblest apologies. I fear even with both ends of the landau’s hoods raised, ladies, you’ll not arrive entirely dry.”
Emily produced her most winsome smile. “I don’t care a fig about the mud, really.”
Handing her in, he bowed again. “We’ll follow behind and look for you there.”
Emily lifted a gloved hand as he mounted his horse and cantered away through the rain.
“You don’t care a fig,” groused Angelina, as she shifted in the seat across from her, “because Dinah’s the one who just washed it and has the hands to show for the lye and the lemon juice and the boiling water, then sewed every button back on. And now will wash it again.”
“Angelina, can you not just enjoy the evening?”
“You know, you and my mother both call me Nina only when you’re feeling pleased with my behavior. Which means I hear ‘Angelina’ from both of you most of the time.”
Emily ignored this. “Dinner at Governor Bennett’s. A house full of Charleston’s first families. And us just out in society. How can you be so gloomy?”
Angelina tugged absently at her dress. “Gloomy is not what I am.”
“What, then? Generally taciturn and irritable?” Emily rearranged her skirts carefully. “Perhaps—and I should have been more sensitive to your feelings as my oldest friend—perhaps you’re not happy with John Aiken’s attentions to me.” She tried to meet her friend’s eyes. “If there is any understanding between you—”
Angelina waved this away. “It’s not that. Not at all.” The landau’s wheels rattled over the crushed shell and slogged through long puddles. “Emily, how much did you hear when we were in the alley the other day—trying to get in the side door of the blacksmith shop on East Bay?”
“Oh. That.” Emily turned her face toward the open window, storm clouds like tattered black and gray quilts, thunder rolling across the bay at the same pitch as the carriage wheels. “I wondered when we’d get around to discussing that. I was beginning to guess you’d pretend you heard nothing. That I’d imagined the whole thing.”
Angelina leaned so far forward she was hardly still seated at all. “What did you hear?” She reached for Emily’s hand.
Emily huffed and jerked away. “What I heard, I’d like to forget. Until this moment, in fact, I’d convinced myself I’d misheard the words.”
Angelina pressed her lips into a line. “Tell me just one word, then.”
Emily stared out at the water, the harbor in seizures now as the wind battered down.
“I can’t.” She drew a long breath. “I won’t say it aloud.”
They rode for a time with only the rhythm of the wheels over the street’s sand smoothing the jagged-edged silence.
Emily kept her eyes on the street through the crack in the landau’s two hoods. “There’s Penina Moise. Poor woman.”
Nina, sulking, only grunted from across the carriage.
“She must be headed to their temple on Hasell—and here in this rain, of all things. All those brothers and sisters to care for, and her father dying when she was twelve, and a sick mother, all the household duties falling to her. I asked her once—”
“I know,” Nina said, rousing, “that you’re changing the subject.”
“I’ll have you know that Penina Moise is a friend. Even if she is a Jewess.” Emily pointed with a gloved hand out the window, the set of her jaw announcing she would persist in the distraction of chatter. “And, look, there is that ridiculous Quaker couple, the last in Charleston, so far as I know. Although someone seems to keep their meetinghouse standing, even run-down as it is. Heavens, could that bonnet be becoming on any woman? I admit I’m surprised any Quakers would stay on here, what with the stridency of their views.”
Emily stopped there. “I’m sorry. Your sister’s move last year to Philadelphia . . . people say she’s become one of them. I wasn’t thinking.”
“They are against slavery. I’m not sure, however, that I’d call them strident.”
Emily shrugged this away. “At any rate, that couple’s horse appears lame. Which would explain, I suppose, the reason they are knocking at the door of the blacksmith.”
At this last word, the girls exchanged glances, and Emily pressed her lips hard together.
Nina leaned forward. “What was it you heard in the blacksmith’s shop?”
But Emily, jaw set, only turned her face back toward the street.
Emily stationed herself near the serving tables draped in white linen and heaped with platters of creamed oysters, bacon, shrimp, cakes, and steamed mullet, along with pedestaled compotes holding pistachios and dried apricots and fresh pineapple and baked apples, the sterling reflecting the candles’ glow. A tall, lanky servant in white gloves dished almond ice next to a stack of blue Canton porcelain with scenes of pagodas and arched bridges.
Angelina, still shaking water from the hem of her skirts, followed her there. “Julius,” she whispered.
Emily tried turning her back, pretending she didn’t hear.
But Ni
na would not be ignored. “It’s his name, you know.”
Emily scanned the ballroom as couples began to form their squares for the next quadrille. “Who on earth do you mean?”
“The servant serving the ices. His name is Julius. One of the Bennetts’ footmen.”
“All right, Nina. You won’t leave me be until I ask. So I’ll ask: What is it? Why on earth should I care what the name of the Bennetts’ footman should happen to be?”
“Naming a slave after a Roman ruler.” She blinked. “You see it, too, don’t you? The irony of it?”
Emily set her plate down so hard its sterling spoon jumped. “No, Angelina. I don’t. No one ever sees what you see, not even me. My lands, you can be so peculiar.”
Now a strong waft of bourbon and mint passed by: the juleps on a platter balanced high on a dark hand, the slave tiptoeing his way through a landscape of bright gowns.
Walking their way, James Hamilton swirled the claret that half filled his glass.
“The mayor,” Nina whispered, “is talking with your father. And Governor Bennett.”
Emily put a finger to her lips.
“Nothing,” Hamilton was saying, “but grave concern for you, Governor, and your interests. It’s only that there is reason to think the servants in your very household—and possibly yours, too, Jackson, have been exposed to all sorts of abolitionist outrage.”
The servants spooning the oysters and ices did not move. No more of a flinch than the parian busts that sat between windows—one each of Presidents Jefferson and Washington and one of King Charles II of England.
“You and I, Governor, each have our own reasons for knowing the man to be a menace. Quite possibly a dangerous one.”
Bennett scoffed. “Vesey is a nuisance, I’ll grant you. But not dangerous. As for my own household, Rolla and Ned there”—he nodded toward the footman behind the steamed mullet—“would no more see me harmed than they would their own flesh and blood.”
The footman Ned, towering over the petticoat clouds and dark coats floating by, might not have heard. He stared straight ahead, the red of the claret and the gold of the champagne and the pale green of the juleps making rainbows in crystal that sparkled and shifted their arcs.
“Miss Pinckney,” came a man’s voice.
Turning in time to greet John Aiken, dry and impeccably groomed now after standing in the downpour to help her into the carriage, Emily curtsied. “Why, Mr. Aiken. How gallant of you, your behavior this evening. Miss Grimké and I . . .” A flicker of disapproval passed over his face as she said her friend’s name. “We were most grateful.”
Without looking back, she let herself be washed into the swirl of skirts, the brass sconces along the walls blurring into a single ribbon of gold.
The last dance of the night, nearly dawn now, brought the girls into the same quadrille diagonally from one another.
“I’m sorry,” Emily whispered as they glided past one another the first time. “I’ll tell you,” she added at the next pass, “what I heard in the shop.”
Nina’s face turned from her partner.
“I heard,” Emily said as she spun back, “only one word clearly.”
But the violins plunged to a halt. The dance had ended. Couples bowed to one another, then joined the other guests moving as a river toward the cascade of staircase to wait for carriages below.
Once inside the landau they said nothing at first, both of their faces turned toward the harbor. The rain had stopped, but the wind still gusted hard. Nina leaned out over the edge of the open landau, let the wind whip at her hair, which was coming loose from its pins. At the opposite side of the carriage, Emily closed her eyes against the gale.
“Weapons,” she said at last, her voice barely rising above the force of the wind. “The word I heard them say in the shop was weapons.”
The wheels splashed forward, the horses’ iron shoes crunching wet sand.
Harness rings jangled.
At last, Angelina eased back in her seat, long strands of hair in her face, down her neck: “Em, look at me. This is what happened: we both misheard. We had to have. If we told this, what we misheard, to your father or mine—to anyone—it would mean disaster. To lots of innocent people. Not just now but for years. Decades, even. Emily. Please. Look at me. We will repeat this—what we misunderstood—to no one. Ever. Promise me that.”
Chapter 8
2015
Kate turned from the harbor, the wind whipping her hair into her face so she could hardly see. A block down East Bay, she could make out the form of the elderly woman walking away with the straightest of spines, not even hunching into the gale. Mrs. Lila Rose Manigault Pinckney—was that what she’d said? What a name. The smell of magnolia practically wafted from it.
Miz Rose, the waitress had called her.
She had somehow spotted Kate as a Drayton—her father’s daughter. Which was a jolt. All Kate’s life, people had commented on her favoring her mother—even convenience store clerks in the Berkshires who never exchanged pleasantries with the customers would grin at Sarah Grace and ask whether she or her sister—they generally winked here—was the oldest. But Kate’s being picked out as her father’s daughter by a complete stranger had never happened before.
Kate pressed herself closer to the outer walls of the shop Cypress & Fire. Its old paned windows, thick and dimpled, reflected the sky, a mottled gray and black now. Past the shop’s window display of free-standing sculptures, modern and gleaming, sat furniture: chess tables and nightstands, headboards and mirrors, all of them embellished in ceramic with copper inlays and bright, swirling colors. Clearly, this gallery was one she could not afford.
Huddled under the eaves, Kate dialed the office for Botts’s firm again, and this time was sent by a receptionist—“I’m afraid he’s out of the office today”—to his personal voice mail. Something cold and brittle in the slow-moving sounds of his Low Country accent, like an echo rebounding off ice: “You have reached Percival Botts, founding partner of Rutledge, Wragg, Roper & Botts, Attorneys at Law. I will return your call”—a pause—“as time allows.”
“Just following up,” Kate said. “To set a specific time for when we’d meet here in Charleston.” Kate left her cell number—again.
As she hung up, something about the number she’d just called made her wonder . . . she tapped “Recent Calls” to scan the digits again, the Charleston prefix: 843.
Swinging her backpack around to her front, she dug for the Places with a Past brochure with the string of numbers scrawled at the bottom of the Vesey memorial page—it began, in fact, with 843. A phone number, then. But the chances of the number still belonging to the same person—even if it was still a landline, as it must have been in 1991—had to be minuscule.
Still, holding her breath, Kate dialed.
One ring. Then two.
Kate turned to peer into the gallery behind her as she waited through another ring. And another.
Deep at the shop’s back, something glowed inside a cavelike structure. And a dark figure bent near the glow, examined what looked like a tray full of tiles, and closed the door on the fire.
So the shop was part gallery—elite, handcrafted art—at its front and part working kiln at its back. And wood shop, too, it seemed. Very appealing, really, letting the high-dollar clients see just how their art and their furnishings were being made.
The dark figure turned and bent his substantial frame over a long table.
The phone had rung now probably twelve times or more with no answer. Kate hung up. Another dead end. Still, though, there’d been no out-of-service message, no fourteen-year-old letting her know it was a wrong number. So maybe worth calling again.
And meanwhile, it was time she ducked in out of the wind.
Bracing herself against the next gust, Kate slipped through the front door of the gallery, the wind slamming the wooden door behind her.
Suddenly, from behind the stone counter, something flew at her, cuffs flapping just past
his little hands.
The boy from the seawall threw himself at Kate for a hug.
Laughing, Kate pulled him off after a moment. “Didn’t you ever make it to school?”
“Made it. But my stomach went to pinching again like it does, which the nurse said was maybe me feeling sad as much as me being regular sick but she was sending me home just in case of the sick.”
“I’m sorry about the sick. And the sad. But it’s really good to see you again, little guy.”
“Recollect now: that’s not what you’d be wanting to call me.” He grinned, then cocked his head. “And you look like hell.”
Kate put a hand to her hair—the windblown mess of it. “Yeah, well.” She flattened her palm. “A quarter a cuss.”
His brow crinkled, and he patted both pockets. “Ain’t got nothing on me today.”
“You can owe me, then. But I do collect. What’s this great place you found here?”
“Look.” He grabbed her hand and pulled her to the opening at one end of the stacked-stone counter. “Dirt floor!” he announced, pointing exultantly to the ground and kicking off his own shoes, toes wriggling now in dirt mixed with coarse sand and crushed shell. “Hardwood out there in the gallery. Dirt floor back here in the shop.”
Straightening, the craftsman at the back stepped forward. “Can I help you?”
“I was admiring your gallery,” Kate said. “And didn’t expect to be finding my very first friend in this city hanging out here.”
The boy nodded importantly. “That’d be me.”
The craftsman held out a hand covered in sawdust and clay—which he quickly withdrew, wiping both hands in quick swipes on his khaki shorts. On his left hand, the gold of a wedding band flashed. And there was something about the man’s manner, too, that suggested clear lines—polite, but just distant enough to announce there were boundaries. Like a fence whose sturdiness let you know it was safe to lean on. Kate felt herself relax.
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