A Tangled Mercy

by Joy Jordan-Lake

  Again, Vesey’s eyebrow shot up. “You do know things.”

  “When you run a shop on East Bay, you got the pulse of the town. Not much happen in this city I don’t know about before.”

  “A shop you run. That’s right, Tom. That’s more the spirit I’ve been looking to hear out of you.”

  “Can you do it or not? Keep my name out of it?”

  Vesey considered a moment. “It can be done. And I’ll tell you this: your joining us makes me more sure than ever we will succeed.”

  “Reckon you didn’t hear me too good. I’m not joining you.”

  “Making the rest of our . . . implements, then. And let me promise you this: your name will go with me to the very grave.” He held out his hand.

  Tom shook it but pulled his own hand quickly away. “That rabbit George Wilson, he one of your new recruits? He was headed out here like he might be wondering what was happening—and scared half to death.”

  Vesey’s brow furrowed. “With the exception of Ned and Rolla Bennett at the governor’s, there’s not a house slave in the whole army. Can’t be trusted. Pull the trigger on my own head before I tried to recruit the likes of George Wilson.”

  Tom disappeared into the dark, leaving Vesey behind to stare at the stars.

  Back in the shop, Tom shoveled ash over the last of the glowing coals. But stopped.

  On the far wall of the forge, where he’d mounted a piece of chipped slate he’d found on the street, he’d chalked up with soft rock the next several months of orders. Just four grids for this month, April, and the following three, May, June, and July. Instead of words or numbers, he’d sketched rough pictures—a gate with lyres or a fence with damascened gold at its tips—positioned as many squares away as days until the projects were due.

  Only one white man had examined it well, that wall. He’d gazed up at the sketches and squares. But after a moment, Colonel Drayton had only shaken his head and laughed.

  “I’m impressed, Tom,” he’d said. “I am impressed.”

  Tom let one finger count forward now to the month of July and day fourteen.

  He marked the day with only a picture: a gate.

  An open one.

  Returning to the forge, he hauled on the rope to the bellows and fanned up the flame.

  Then thrust iron rods into the fire.

  The quarter hour of warning drums would be stopping soon, even here in the Neck, the northern part of the peninsula that housed scores of free blacks and slaves hired out for their skills by their owners. He’d been given permission two years ago to move from the quarters behind the Russell home and into a room in the Neck shared by four other artisan slaves. They were still watched and patrolled and told when to be in for the night and how many could congregate where. But it had been a small taste of freedom, a taste he knew better than to risk by ignoring curfew.

  But he’d just signed on for a rebellion that, if it went according to plan and fanned the spirit of liberty and hope, could sweep the Low Country—could free slaves across the South.

  And if it failed . . . then being hauled to the workhouse for breaking curfew would be the least of his worries.

  Tom lifted his hammer and brought it down in a shattering blow.

  Chapter 12

  2015

  Kate stood in the alley that ran between Penina Moise and the gallery that Gabe and his father owned and listened a moment to the clatter of cookware from the back of the café on one side and the clanging of something metal from the gallery on the other—as if one of the sculptures might have toppled. Something in the racket on both sides helped focus her mind.

  As humiliating as it might be, she’d come here to confront Botts again—and if she had to make a scene in a public place, so be it. Whatever he knew—or did not—about the implosion of her parents’ marriage or about her mother’s compulsion to study a nineteenth-century slave revolt, it had to be more than Kate did.

  I beg you to hold close what only the three of us know, her mother had written to someone on the back of that photo.

  Could one of the three have been Percival Botts?

  Meanwhile, she had to keep trying every path she could find to possible answers.

  Pausing outside the door, Kate redialed the phone number her mother had scribbled at the bottom of the Places with a Past booklet. A ring. And then two.

  And then a clatter—someone picking up finally?

  But it was only the kitchen of the café again. More rings—and no answer. Frustrated, Kate tossed the booklet and her phone into her backpack.

  Stepping inside the café, Kate wound through shelves of Low Country cookbooks and Sea Island blackberry scone mix and sweetgrass baskets. The platinum-haired waitress chirped at her to follow.

  “For folks by their ownself,” the waitress tossed back, “we got a table off to the corner can’t fit even two very good. ’Cause in Charleston, nobody much eats alone.”

  Guess that makes me nobody much, Kate opened her mouth to say but instead ordered an iced coffee. Not only was she not officially meeting anyone here, she didn’t even know what time the person she’d come to ambush might be seeing his client for lunch. Just wait till this waitress had to watch this nobody much eat alone for the next couple of hours.

  On the cover of the café’s menu, an oval daguerreotype featured a woman with dark hair looped on both sides of her head to a bun at the back. Inside, the menu described the talents of Penina Moise, an antebellum Jewish poet and hymn writer, a faithful member of Charleston’s own Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim, the first Sephardic synagogue in the nation.

  Arranging her laptop, Kate called up the website of the Historic Charleston Foundation—which, it turned out, owned several of the house museums in town, including the mansion on Meeting Street where Nathaniel and Sarah Russell had lived—and presumably the blacksmith Tom, too, unless he was one of the small class of urban slaves allowed to “live out” in separate quarters. Kate shot the archivist at the foundation an e-mail with several questions, including whether they had any information on Tom, such as where his shop might have been or any indication that he might indeed have survived the summer of 1822. Kate included a request for an in-person meeting.

  She scanned the café again for Botts. And kept an eye on the door.

  A short, bearded man was moving from table to table. He bent for hugs, spun to greet an old friend, swept up an infant and swayed with the baby as he beamed at another table of guests. Servers dodged and busboys pirouetted out of his way. But he—with his beard, his scraggled hair, and his squat, solid form—was the center of a kind of graceful, if precarious, dance.

  “I came to my senses,” he roared to one table, his head thrown back in a laugh, “in New York as a young man and freed all future generations of Greenbergs from the cold. As a young man, I discovered what few people know: that a Jew does not, after all, shrivel up in the sun like a grape. My people suffered the pogroms. Kristallnacht. The Holocaust. Must we also always suffer the cold?”

  The table of diners laughed with him.

  “Your daughters, then?” one diner asked. “How are they?”

  The owner shook his leonine head. “A child learns nothing that comes from the lips of her father. This is wise, to ignore such advice?” He hit his forehead with the heel of one hand. “But this is the way of the young. Not one, I tell you, but both, both, my daughters have moved to New York. Lawyers, the two of them. This contributes, I ask, to the good of the world?”

  A short man in a dark suit entered the café and turned his face to the street. Kate held her breath.

  But the man, who turned again and took a seat, was not Botts.

  A female diner dressed all in linen—that elderly lady Lila Rose Pinckney from the table outside this morning, Kate realized—lifted her wineglass to the bearded man. “I must say, Mordecai, and you may tell your lovely girls I said so, that I fail to see any point in drawing breath anywhere outside the Low Country.”

  “Ah, well said, well sa
id. They will come home someday and settle here, when their bones grow brittle and break to splinters from all that cold. I tell them this.”

  And now he was spinning toward Kate.

  “Welcome!” he thundered, arms up and open. “Welcome to Penina Moise!”

  In front of Kate landed a box of steaming Sea Island blackberry scones.

  “My gift,” said Mordecai Greenberg, “to the stranger in a strange land.”

  “These smell amazing. Thank you.”

  He nodded to the books she’d unloaded from her backpack onto the table. “This is why a young lady such as yourself must eat alone?” He read off a few titles: “He Shall Go Out Free: The Lives of Denmark Vesey. Deliver Us from Evil. The Trial Record of . . . this is the reading that takes the place of a lunch companion?”

  “It’s for my work. A working lunch.” Why was she apologizing now to someone she didn’t even know for how she wanted to spend her time? And why did people down here assume they had the right to comment on her life?

  As if responding to what she’d been thinking, he patted her hand. “My own girls would tell me I must sometimes keep my thoughts to myself. I say only that you and your books are most welcome here. Only don’t eat too often alone. Books can be like friends, yes. But do they keep you warm at night when you grow old? I ask you.”

  The older woman Kate had met this morning was holding up something for the platinum-haired waitress to see: a New York Times, apparently left by a previous diner on a chair at her table.

  The waitress reached to clear it away.

  But Rose did not relinquish the paper. “I do not purchase these. Ever. If left in my path, however, I feel it my duty to keep apprised of those scurrilous scalawags to the north.”

  The woman’s accent was an absolute river, soft on the consonants, long on the vowels, gentle on flow.

  Cautiously, Kate slid from her seat and approached the woman. “Forgive me, Mrs. Pinckney, but I believe we met briefly earlier today. I’m Kate Drayton.” She held out her hand.

  The older woman nodded, one silver eyebrow still hovering high in its arch. “Of course, dear. I’m hardly likely to forget.”

  “I don’t mean to bother you if you’re waiting on someone, but I was curious this morning that you seemed—and maybe I had the wrong impression—that you seemed to know who I was. Before, I mean, I’d told you my name.”

  “I’d have picked you for Heyward’s daughter anywhere.”

  “Then you knew my father?”

  A pause, infinitesimally short but enough to suggest that whatever she’d known of Heyward Drayton might have been complicated.

  “Why, yes. I did. And please allow me to convey my sympathies on the passing of both your father and mother—in such a short span of time, too. I declare, what a sad . . . state of affairs.”

  And again, that odd, constrained look. As if she were speaking more broadly than of only their deaths.

  “You knew, then? About their deaths? Word traveled back here?”

  “All word travels through Charleston, I assure you. All word worth hearing.”

  “Mrs. Pinckney, I wonder if I could ask—”

  “Please, do call me Rose. Not Miz Rose, as half the town does, or Mrs. Harold Pinckney, as the lesser half does.”

  “I’m a graduate student in history, specializing in the early nineteenth-century Low Country, and I’ve come to Charleston to further my research.” Even if she were on academic probation, teetering on the edge of final dismissal, at least it still served as a reason for being here—without drawing questions that she had no answers for.

  The waitress set a glass on Rose’s table. “Here’s your Chardonnay, Miz Rose. ’Bout ready to order that shrimp and grits, light on the andouille sausage?”

  Rose raised a hand. “Do give us a moment, won’t you?” It was more command than request.

  The platinum helmet snapped right, and the waitress flounced three tables away.

  “Katherine Drayton, I had heard through various reliable sources that you were in this field.”

  Kate blinked. “You’d heard that?”

  “Charleston is a small town in many ways, at least for those of us whose families have known one another for generations. I must say that I wondered when you would be coming down.”

  Not if, Rose had said. But when.

  “Mrs. Pinckney—Rose, I wonder if I might talk with you sometime.”

  Rose stiffened a little. Guarded. “Talk with me, dear?”

  “About what you knew of my father—and my mother, too, if you knew her. Honestly, I’d love to hear anything you’d like to tell me.”

  Rose appeared to be gazing out the window and took a moment to answer. “Naturally,” she said at last, “you would have questions.” Her gaze drifted back to Kate, and Rose seemed almost startled to find her still there. “How would tomorrow be, sugar, at, let us say, half past ten? My home, if you’d like to write the address down, is—”

  Scrambling to her table for a pen and hurrying back, Kate sent a wine goblet near Rose flying, and it shattered on the floor.

  The waitress came running, with a comforting chatter of “Hon, now you don’t worry yourself none at all, you hear?”

  Kate knelt to pluck shards from the floor.

  Rose, unfazed, only nodded absently. “Good. Yes. That’s good.”

  From where she crouched, Kate lifted her head. “I’m sorry, good?”

  But Rose was not looking at her. “Sometimes things get broken when you go after the truth. And sometimes people get hurt.”

  “The truth? I’m not sure . . .”

  Rose’s gaze swung to meet Kate’s. “What’s that, dear?”

  “You said something about the truth. Things getting broken when you go after the truth.”

  “Did I?” Rose asked. “Well now. Sometimes I do slip and say what I mean, instead of what ought to be said.” She smoothed the linen pleats of her skirt as if she were realigning her thoughts. “Let us hope that you are one of those who falls helplessly under Charleston’s spell. I wonder if perhaps in your studies you have heard of a certain Angelina Grimké.”

  Just standing up as she scanned the restaurant again for Botts, Kate turned, startled. “Angelina Grimké? Of the Grimké sisters from here in Charleston? Of course. That’s my era.”

  “I understand the old girls are rather well known outside Charleston. Their ancestral home here on East Bay has only just received its own marker. And high time, I might add.”

  Kate sank back into the chair across from Rose. “You’ll be glad to know that the Grimké sisters have become better known lately. They get trundled out as the sort of antebellum American South counterparts to the few people in Paris who hid Jews during the Vélodrome d’Hiver roundup—as people who could somehow see past the culture around them. To me, Angelina and Sarah Grimké are endlessly intriguing: raised in a slaveholding family, but both the girls growing up to question the whole system—and then fight against it as abolitionists. I’ve always wondered what they saw or heard or read growing up that made them that way—different, I mean.”

  Rose tapped a white forefinger against deeply lined lips. “Yes,” she said. “What they saw that made them different.”

  Kate leaned in toward her. “Rose, you mentioned Angelina specifically.”

  “Yes.” Rose hedged, wavering on a decision. “Yes, I did.”

  “Most people seem to know more of Sarah Grimké—if they’ve even heard of either of them. Was there a reason that you mentioned Angelina?”

  Rose pursed her lips. Then offered, “I have in my possession a few . . . let us call them family papers. From what you have called, I believe, your era.”

  “Family papers? You mean . . . letters?”

  “Some, yes. And in particular a journal. One of my ancestors, it seems, was a particular friend of Angelina Grimké’s. Perhaps you might like to have a brief look.”

  Kate stared. “Rose, you realize, surely, that your family papers might be
incredibly valuable to historians’ understanding of the early nineteenth-century South.”

  Mrs. Lila Rose Manigault Pinckney gazed back. “I should hope so. They are incredibly valuable just now to me in my understanding of it. For my own reasons, I’ve chosen to keep these family documents to myself for the time being. I am, however, intrigued with the idea of allowing you, given your interests, to peruse them along with me. A trial run, perhaps, would be in order.”

  “Rose, I would absolutely love to see whatever it is you have. But these papers eventually belong somewhere that could be monitored, climate controlled.”

  “So I understand. People from the Southern Historical Collection from Chapel Hill have more than once prostrated themselves on my doorstep. But, oh my Lord, those white gloves of inferior cotton they use.”

  Kate did not volunteer that some archives used worse: disposable plastic surgical gloves.

  “My ancestors, Katherine, that great cloud of witnesses, would not approve of just anyone peering into their lives.”

  Mordecai Greenberg appeared by Rose’s side, his cheeks flushed a deep red above the scraggle of his beard. He laid a hand on her shoulder. “My dear friend, it falls to me to inform you—why it falls to me and not him, I don’t know—that your lunch meeting must be postponed.”

  Kate said the name before she’d fully registered who Rose Pinckney’s lunch companion was supposed to have been. “Botts.”

  “Why, yes.” Rose studied Kate’s face an instant. “You would know him, I suppose, through your father.”

  Greenberg shook his head. “The schmendrick. He shows up at the door. I greet him. He is not polite. He starts this direction. Then he orders me—not asks but orders—to come and tell my good friend that her lunch has been postponed. And is a reason of medical emergency given?” He shook his head again. “Your wine, my friend, is on the house today. Are you ready to order?”

  Botts must have taken one look at the young woman sitting at his client’s table—so Rose Pinckney is also a client of Percival Botts?—concluded that Kate was there to confront him again, and fled.