Jotting notes, Kate turned the page.
On the fourth sheet, Tom’s name appeared again.
Mary, mother of Tom, sold in private sale to Drayton Hall. Insubordination.
Kate sat back hard in her chair. Drayton Hall. Her family name. Coupled there with the severing of a slave mother from her son.
Nathaniel Russell, a native of Rhode Island, Kate had just read, had made his fortune as a shipping merchant, trading all sorts of consumer goods, including slaves. In the language of a ship’s captain, he had found Tom’s mother’s behavior unacceptable, insubordinate, and had relegated her to . . . what? The fields?
Kate’s stomach churned.
On her laptop, Kate called up the website for Drayton Hall: a former rice plantation built in the eighteenth century on the banks of the Ashley River. Open to the public—with a still-tended slave burying ground.
Kate made a note of Drayton Hall’s location just a few miles out from town, scanned the last page of the Russell family’s folder, adjusted the gloves she was required to wear, and shifted to a letter, written in 1822, from a family close to the Russells. The mistress of the house appeared to be the author, the size of her handwriting growing, engorged, the words spilling over with both bile and regret as her hand covered the page.
A curse—to master and slave. Or shall I say more accurately, mistress and slave. God help us. Can we not all see the light skin of the servants in our neighbors’ homes, yet are blind to the selfsame thing in our own?
Kate paused to rub her eyes, which were beginning to blur, with the back of her wrist. Wearing the white gloves the archives required had its challenges. And hours of trying to decipher the smudged ink on yellowed paper of several dozen unfamiliar hands was taking its toll.
Will not the Divine Judge, who has made all men of one blood to dwell on the face of the earth, burn away the evils?
Typical, Kate thought. Another white woman from the slaveholding class who was fairly clear-eyed about the horrors of slavery for everyone concerned—and could throw in a biblical quote like this to back up her sense of revulsion and wrong. But would not say a word—except in privacy, to a trusted correspondent or a diary.
Kate stopped there and, making notes for the next day’s research on where she’d stopped, closed the folder.
A creak just outside the door of the South Carolina Room made her jump.
The processing archivist poked her head through the door. “Gone cross-eyed yet?”
“Two hours ago.”
“Happy to hear it. Means you’d not be wasting your time here. Or mine. Didn’t you tell me this morning when you came in—you and the Starbucks you were trying to hide behind the backpack . . . oh yes, I did see—that you had a meeting with Rose Pinckney set up for this morning at ten thirty?”
Checking the time again, Kate rose and stretched. “Think it’ll take me longer than ten minutes to walk from here to the south tip of Meeting Street?”
“Mm-hmm. And let me tell you, that is one woman I would not be late for. Except for the rich and the white, Miz Rose reminds me of my own momma: got honey in the voice and steel in the eye.”
Following the walking map on her phone, Kate jogged, sometimes slowing to speed-walk some of the dozen or so city blocks. At the last stretch of Meeting Street before the Battery, and beyond it the ocean, she stopped to yank off her sandals, their straps cutting into her skin. She finished the journey barefoot, sandals in hand.
At Rose’s address, a pair of brick staircases curved up like two arms to its front portico, rounded and plump. The piazzas on its left side were stacked one on top of the other, its cupola top like a tiny beret. With a start, she recognized the house as the one Scudder Lambeth had walked across from the inn to work on. So he must be connected with Rose Pinckney, too, just like Daniel Russell had mentioned her as a longtime customer. Everyone here seemed linked somehow to everyone else.
Except for me, Kate couldn’t help but add—and hated how pathetic it sounded in her head. Always on the outside of the circle, looking in.
She mounted one side of the paired stairs. The beige clapboard frame sat quiet—a stark contrast to the hubbub of tourists in gold-fringed carriages and the occasional sightseeing van that rounded from the harbor, passengers gasping over the gardens and mansions.
Mrs. Lila Rose Manigault Pinckney herself flung open the door before Kate could knock. “I’ve always said Charleston appears at her best just after a rain, and today she’s all dolled up in glitter. I am so glad you’ve come.”
Rose’s gaze dropped once, but only once, to the sandals Kate clutched and to her bare feet. One silver eyebrow arched high, Rose led the way without comment up a graceful sweep of broad stairs as Kate, ramming the sandals back on, stumbled after her. Just past the stairs’ landing, French doors opened onto a porch clustered with white wicker beneath hanging ferns.
“Rose, you have a beautiful home.”
“Built in 1809, dear. My husband, God rest his soul, insisted on only the finest preservation work. If I’d had as many parts guarded against age as this house, I’d be carded when buying my bourbon. Do be seated.”
Kate hesitated at the long backless bench, painted black, with rocking bases at both ends.
“It’s called a joggling board, sugar, and every home—of any import—here in Charleston has one on its piazza that was passed down at least five generations. They’re part of a game, a mating ritual here. One lowers oneself onto the board—gracefully, of course, and with poise—in such a way as to joggle oneself closer to whichever beau one has strategically arranged to sit nearest.”
Rose motioned to a white wicker table spilling over with pastries and breads. “A kind of midmorning repast, all from here in the Low Country: Carolina rice scones—with watermelon-rind preserves and just-the-right-kind-of-sour crab-apple jelly. And here we have homemade granola with benne seeds and pecans and Charleston-grown tea.” Rose motioned with a wrinkled hand, her long fingers still delicate, graceful. “I assume you’ve had a good many?”
Kate lowered herself onto a white wicker love seat and tugged at her sundress, crumpled beneath her. “Many . . . ?”
“Beaux, dear. Suitors. You’re not lacking in beauty. Though admittedly, your manners—no doubt owing to your being raised in the North—can be rather abrupt, you know. The want of good manners, however, can be easily tweaked; the want of a good chin cannot.”
Kate’s mouth twitched. “No one in particular. Unless you count some guys along the way with a string of graduate degrees apiece but no income.”
“Lines, my dear, must be drawn.” Rose poured the tea. “So you are not—how do the young people say it these days?—talking with anyone? The term makes no sense at all in this usage, you know.”
Kate bit into a scone. “Truth is, I have no interest in talking with anyone at this stage of my life.” She paused, little Gabe’s face flashing into her mind: the curls that fell over his eyes, the thick of his lashes as he looked up into her eyes. “Unless he’s younger than twelve and it’s actually talking.” She lifted a china saucer with a blue-and-white pagoda on it. “This is nice.”
“It’s come down in the family, sugar. The whole set has been buried twice in the backyard. Once from the British and once from the Yankees.” Rose eyed Kate a moment as if she just might abscond with a plate.
The porch doors groaned at the entrance of a housekeeper balancing a tray with two sterling tumblers at its center.
“Ah, the juleps. Thank you, Marguerite.”
“Rose, I was wondering . . .”
Rose Pinckney waited, brow raised, as Kate lifted the sterling to her lips.
“Oh!” Kate fought back a grimace. “They are . . . wow.”
“Criminally sweet?”
“Yes. Actually.”
“Breathtakingly strong?”
“Well . . .”
“Perfectly vile?”
Kate laughed. “Yes.”
Rose nodded. “I could not agree m
ore. And this after a lifetime of trying to stomach the things. They’re nothing but pulverized mint, crushed ice, a stultifying shower of sugar, and enough bourbon to submerge the Hunley again—our Civil War submarine, of which we are unreasonably proud.” She raised a tumbler. “So, Katherine Drayton . . .”
“I go by Kate.”
“So what do you think of Charleston?”
“It’s gorgeous. Honestly, I’m enchanted and appalled at the same time.”
“Appalled, dear?”
“You know, because of the history. And even . . .” Kate saw again Gabe by the fountain that night, the boy reaching into his pocket for his Rubik’s Cube—and nearly flattened for supposedly having a gun. But Charleston was hardly the only city where this kind of thing happened. Far from it, which was part of Daniel’s point. Maybe you just felt the weight of it more, standing in the port city where a good half of the slaves brought into the country had entered. Maybe it felt like layers and layers of something slow to peel off. Kate considered a moment and went on. “But the architecture! Those funny little false doors that lead to these porches: as charming as anything I’ve ever seen.”
Rose held up a hand. “Single houses, my dear. Architecture imported from Barbados to maximize the sea breezes on the piazzas—not porches—and still keep a front door facing the street. Your father, of course”—Rose was watching her face—“would have encouraged every twist and turn of your research about Charleston.”
“He wasn’t exactly around to be telling me stories.” She watched Rose’s face in return. “As you may be aware.”
But Rose’s smile, static as an oil portrait, betrayed nothing.
“If anything, my father actively discouraged my research on the Low Country.” Kate could still see him so clearly, the way he’d sat ramrod straight in Legal Sea Foods in Boston—preferring to take her to a public place the handful of times they’d met over the years, as if fearing what sort of scene she might make in private. That day at Legal, her first fall as a graduate student at Harvard, he’d asked her perfunctory questions: How did she like Cambridge? Was her apartment close to Harvard Square? What would her research emphasis be, or did she know yet?
He’d watched her warily throughout the dinner, as if any break in the conversation might allow her to go rogue and offer something he did not want to hear, like how Sarah Grace was doing.
In response to his last question, Kate had tried for a personal connection with him. “Early nineteenth-century Low Country Carolina is what I’m thinking—in part thanks to your side of the family, the Draytons of Charleston. And I feel like the Denmark Vesey revolt—all the people swept up in it, all that it represented—was the pivotal moment for Charleston. In a way, for the whole South. For the whole nation.”
He’d listened, lips pressed hard together, the blue vein in the middle of his forehead beginning to pulse.
“This, I assume, is thanks to your mother,” he’d spat. “Her obsession with reading about it. Let me assure you of this, Katherine: it’s a history that can only hurt you.”
Why? She wished now she’d demanded to know at the time. Longed now to shout at him: Why did it hurt you so badly? And why did it destroy Sarah Grace?
But Heyward DeSaussure Drayton did not tolerate misaligned thoughts, and Kate had never sat long enough in his presence to sort out the right words to ask. The few hours she’d spent with him in the past several years, she’d wanted to be the amiable daughter. The one he might want to see more of. Not the stubbornly independent offspring he’d always preferred to forget. Besides, she’d assumed she had time—decades of it—for sorting through words and demanding to know.
Frowning at the memory, Kate lifted her eyes to find Rose Pinckney studying her. Disconcerted, Kate asked the first question that popped into her head. “How was it exactly that you knew my father?”
“First and foremost, you should know that Charleston is a small town—of international fame—but a small town just the same, in which every house cat’s name is known, at least in what we call South of Broad. Home to the oldest families. Do have another scone.”
Kate’s mouth full—too full, she realized too late—of the scone slathered in crab-apple jelly, she nodded.
“Our family trees are more vines, looping back into each other. I married a Pinckney, of course, but my maternal grandmother was also a Pinckney. Like the royalty of Europe, we’ve encouraged aristocratic inbreeding.”
“To tell you the truth, Rose, in being here I feel a little disloyal to my mother, her having left. It always seemed she felt she had to leave, for some reason.”
“Yes. Yes, of course, dear.” Rose’s eyes drifted out toward the harbor.
Kate waited.
But Rose shifted abruptly in her wicker chair—and her train of thought. “This house predates the Late Unpleasantness. The War of Northern Aggression. You’ll see, if you look straight through the French doors, that portrait that hangs over the sideboard. Emily is the lady’s name.”
Kate opened her mouth to try asking about her father again. But Rose had fixed her eyes determinedly on the portrait.
Rose gestured toward the painting. “She lived here, I should probably add. Do have a closer look, Katherine.”
Kate stood and stepped through the doors. In a full-length portrait, a young woman’s blue satin gown flowed in torrents from her waist to the floor. “Emily looks like she’d have some stories to tell.”
“This was Emily’s bedroom at the time, here on the second story, where the sea breezes could blow through in summer. A woman of ‘surprising opinions,’ they called her—the ones who did not say worse things of her.”
“They?”
“Emily’s diary reflects varying opinions about her from others. Particularly regarding her friendship with Angelina Grimké. Although I regret to say I only seem to have three-fourths of the volume here, the latter portion ripped away.”
“Rose, do you have any idea what this journal—even if it is only three-fourths of one—would be worth to researchers? Primary source material on Angelina Grimké? She was such a prominent abolitionist, an early advocate of women’s rights—the first woman to speak to a legislative body in the United States.”
“But for our purpose here,” Rose returned calmly, “she is merely a girl—about seventeen, I believe—and the confidante of Emily, whose story this is.”
Sitting, Rose lifted a sheaf of letters from the table and ran her fingers over the twine that held them. On the table lay a small volume, its leather binding ragged with loose threads.
“Rose, I don’t think these should be out here in the open air.”
“Of course they shouldn’t be, sugar.”
Kate leaned forward conspiratorially. “But I’m grateful—wicked grateful, as we say in Boston—for the chance you’re giving me to look at them.”
“It may be that you are just the person with whom I might share some choice passages. I could read to you, as we both have time, over the next several weeks.”
Kate hesitated. How long exactly would she be here? She’d tried saying days to Dr. Ammons, but he’d acted like that was nonsense. Told her to stay. Find some answers.
She itched to snatch up the journal and begin reading. Instead, she tried smiling. “I cannot wait to get started. If you’re ready.”
Unhurriedly, Rose reached for the small volume with the tattered binding, its back cover missing entirely. As she lifted the journal, she knocked a small stack of papers onto the piazza floor, these pages not yellowed like the rest, and with no words on them, only one long waving line changing color from black to blue to red to green on one page. And on another, a spiraling ladder of capital letters, like alphabet soup caught in a downward vortex.
Rose snatched up the pages. One silver eyebrow arched high like she was asking a question—whether Kate had been watching, perhaps.
Whatever the papers were, it was clear she did not want Kate to see them.
“The facts,” Rose said, “are i
nconclusive at present. Until further work is done.”
“Facts?”
“Are slippery things.”
The pages with the spiraling ladder of capital letters disappeared in Rose’s rolltop desk, which sat just inside the French doors. But what Kate had glimpsed looked strikingly like the illustrations she recalled from high school biology–textbook chapters on genetics: Mendel the clever monk and his peas.
Imperiously, Rose lifted one shoulder in a hint of a shrug. “I’m having my genetic code mapped.” She paused, stiff and alert, as if preparing to fend off some unseen opposition.
“I think that’s fairly common these days, actually.”
“No.” Rose’s vehemence seemed to startle them both. She regained her composure. “This situation is less . . . usual, you might say. Some careful examination, however, becomes needful at a certain age, when one is faced with one’s own not-too-distant demise and the disbursement of one’s worldly goods. No small task, you know, sugar, to get it right: who is deserving of what. I am more sympathetic now with the pressures on the Almighty.”
Kate lifted the mint julep to her mouth to hide a smile.
Rose flicked a blue-veined hand as if shooing away an annoyance, then settled herself back down into her wicker chair. “At any rate, you’d be amazed what an old silk cravat on which an ancestor perspired heavily can tell us.” She propped the journal open on the wicker table. “If I may read, then, from the diary entry I was perusing when you arrived . . .”
A large florid script covered the journal’s yellowed pages edge to frayed edge, as if its writer’s thoughts were spilling faster than she could turn pages.
“Twenty-ninth of April, year of our Lord 1822,” Rose read aloud.
“Today’s month,” Kate murmured, “nearly two hundred years ago.”
“I’ve made a habit lately of reading the entry for the same date, or close thereabouts, in 1822.” Rose’s gaze flitted once to Kate before she read on:
Nina and I have agreed never to speak of what we overheard—may have overheard—in the blacksmith’s shop on East Bay.
A Tangled Mercy Page 16