Riverrun

by Andrews, Felicia

  “I’m sorry,” she said, biting at the inside of her cheeks. “It’s just that it’s a long story. A long, long story.”

  Sara nodded as though she knew that was the case, and did not speak again until all the food on the tray was gone and she had recovered the plates. Then she set the tray on the floor beside the bed, fussed with the blankets, and fluffed the pillows until she was sure Cass was comfortable and in no great pain.

  “You got things to ask me, don’t you, child?”

  “A hundred and one things,” Cass admitted.

  Sara grinned broadly, though she kept her lips tightly closed. “Thought so. Well, first you get a little more better. Then I take time to talk to you, fair ’nuff? In the mornin’, mebbe. In the mornin’. Meantime, you feel good and tired from all that hot stuff inside you now, don’t you? Mighty tired and lookin’ for someplace you can put your head.”

  Cass nodded, listening to the softly spoken words, watching the staring, smiling brown eyes until her own lids grew too heavy to keep open. She struggled to stay awake, however, because she had questions that needed to be answered; she struggled because she had to find a way back, out of this place and back … out …and back …

  “You’re tired, child.”

  She slept.

  There were no nightmares this time, only a floating, restful oblivion out of which she drifted without struggle, without fear. There was no disorientation. She recognized the room instantly, and grinned with delight at the sweep of fresh morning sunlight that fell onto the carpetless floor. The air was cool, the scent of a dozen unknown flowers filling the room as though bouquets beyond counting had been placed there for her pleasure. Without having to move her head, she saw a curtain of hickory outside the first window, and in it, hidden by the thick foliage, songbirds greeted her in sprightly competition. She tested her leg carefully, noting that the pain was still present but apparently not as sharp or lasting as it had been when she’d first become conscious in this strange, though not fearful, place. She was trying to estimate how long, how many days she had been lying in the bed when the door swung open and Sara bustled in, beaming as though Cass were a long-lost friend and carrying yet another tray laden with sweet-smelling, steaming food.

  “You keep on sleepin’ like that, you gonna be too old to walk one of these here days,” Sara laughed as she set her burden on the mattress. She examined the room critically, clucking and shaking her head, then reached into her voluminous apron. “Thought you might use this, now you comin’ back to the worl’.” She held out the most beautiful hairbrush Cass had ever seen: a slender handle widening to accommodate a thicket of bristles, backed with mother-of-pearl and edged with braided silver.

  “Sara, you’re wonderful!” she said, and looked around expectantly, finally laughing when Sara reached into her pocket again and pulled out a matching hand mirror. “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Nothin’,” the old woman laughed. “Don’t say nothin’.”

  Cass held the mirror face-down on her stomach, hesitant to see what the river and the rebs had done to her.

  Yet, when she looked, she nearly shrieked with delight. She had lost weight, to be sure, her cheekbones were heightened and her chin more prominent; but it was obvious she had been bathed more than once, her hair combed tenderly to rid it of snaggles and burrs. An ugly bruise on her forehead, another on the side of her face, a number of small scratches nearly faded into invisibility; all in all, she thought, she had nothing to complain about and, with the exception of her injured leg, a lot more to be thankful for. She touched the brush to her hair, fanning it down over her shoulders and stroking it tenderly as it lay in a blue-black veil down to her waist. And when she looked up, Sara was gazing at her. The large, brown eyes were soft and hinting at tears.

  “Been a long time,” she said quietly, “since I was able to do somethin’ like that. You don’t mind it?”

  “Oh no, Sara, not at all!”

  The black woman smiled, but barely. “I had a daughter once, ’bout your age if I reckon right. But she got taken for someone down to New Orleans. We ain’t both of us able to write none, so I don’t know to this day how she be, if she gots childs of her own. Now, mind, that was long ’fore Mister Eric. He never sent nobody away. Thems that’re gone, they gone ’cause they want to.”

  Cass thought, then, of her doubts about the war, looked hard at the black woman whose daughter had been sold away from her. Maybe, she thought, it was not futile after all; but in spite of that, she could not rid herself of the cancerous hatred smoldering within her, an indiscriminate rage waiting to erupt at the first opportunity she had to avenge her family’s destruction.

  “You better eat,” Sara admonished quietly.

  “Sara, I—I don’t know how to thank you.”

  There was a moment of awkward silence before the black woman tugged at her earring and pointed at the tray. “You jes’ get yourse’f better,” she ordered in mock sternness. “I gots a devil of a time keepin’ Mister Eric away from you, y’know. You gots to get your strength back. Then you kin talk to him.”

  “Sara,” Cass said as she bit into a biscuit dripping with sweet butter, “who is this Mister Eric you keep talking about?”

  Sara’s eyes widened as though the question were blatant heresy. “Mister Eric? Why, you gots to be jokin’ me, child. Why, he the owner of this here place.”

  “And what, exactly, is this place, Sara?”

  Sara turned herself in a tight circle, like a mother frustrated at explaining the obvious to an obdurate youngster.

  “Why, it’s Riverrun, child! Ain’t you never heard of Riverrun? Used to be before the fightin’ started it was one of the bestest tobacco plantations in the whole state of Virginia. Ain’t no one in the worl’ gots a place like this. Mister Eric, he come and take this place over about five, six year ago, and ain’t no one what gots …” Her voice faded into an incoherent mumbling, and Cass frowned at the suddenly bleak expression that clouded the old woman’s face. She snapped out of it soon enough, however, scratching apologetically at her temple and fussing with the ties of her apron. “I do ramble some, don’t I, child? Do it all the time these days. Mister Eric says it’s ’cause I’m gettin’ older too fast, and I tend sometimes not to disagree. Riverrun ain’t what it used to be no more, not since them blues and grays come runnin’ their horses and whatnot through here. They don’t care ’bout folks makin’ a way with what they got. They come through here like they own the place and they take all the food and the chickens. When the blues come, they tell the niggers they be free and they kin go where they want and some of them do, the fools! They go off into the hills, they joins up the army. I don’t call that them free, child, no siree.”

  “And you stayed, Sara?”

  “Why, sure! I be an old, old woman, child. I be twice as old as you think I be. Where’m I gonna go, a woman my age, black as the dirt and twice as rocky, huh? My man, Martin, he stay around for a while. But like I tol’ you, when you come in here all beaten and bleedin’, he don’t like that and he ’cide to make his fortune someplace outwit the Indians.” She laughed, but Cass saw the pain that creased her ebony face. “Indians. He be crazy, is what he is! Now there jes’ be Mister Eric and me. A bad shame, child. It’s a bad shame when a man what’s a foreigner can’t even—” Her hands waved cuttingly at the air and she ambled back toward the door. “I talk too much. I talk too much.” She turned, then, and pointed at the tray. “You eat and rest, hear? I tell Mister Eric and he be up by ‘n’ by. I gots my work to do still. Lots of work. Damned niggers run off … too much work, if anybody wants to ask me.” The door closed, cutting off her rambling, and the room was suddenly, deeply, quiet.

  Cass stared at the space where Sara had stood, much of her fine humor lost in the story the old woman had told her. Then she rested the tray on her stomach, picked up knife and fork and picked at the food spread before her. As appetizing as the meal was, she could no longer taste it. Riverrun, in Virginia. It
couldn’t be too far into the state or they would have had to travel much longer. Nevertheless, it was far enough, in her present condition, to contain an ocean between herself and her home. She choked on a piece of cornbread and forced back the intruding images of the attack on the farm. Instead, she concentrated on her situation. If nothing else, she had always prided herself on the streak of practicality she seemed to have inherited from her father; and now there was little she could do but mourn her losses, and as Sara had rightly ordered, get herself well and mobile. Only then would she be able to work out a plan to get herself back to Gettysburg, to the valley, to sift through the pieces of the past and possibly find a key to her future. But despite her good intentions and grim determination, there was a tear … and two … and finally a silent, strong flow that drenched her cheeks, fell to her nightdress, silently, steadily.

  And when it was done, when she had dried her face with the cool satin trim on the blanket, she ate. There was no guilt in ignoring the fine quality of Sara’s obviously heartfelt cooking; from now on, food would only be a means to an end, just as would everything else that she did. God … fate … life … whatever one cared to call it had been too capricious, too uncaring. From this moment on, she would be in control as much as she had the power to be.

  After the meal she felt tired and, when it was apparent she would not be visited again that day, allowed herself to doze until the sunlight faded and the room took on a soft, dusky glow. She picked up the brush, then, and ran it through her hair desultorily, not bothering to count the strokes as she had done when she was a girl, staring blankly at the opposite wall until she could stand it no longer. She threw back the covers and took firm hold of her leg with both hands. Cautiously, gingerly, she tried to slip it off the mattress. Twice she was driven back by the throbbing pain; the third time she actually had her sole on the floor, but the knee under the thick wrapping would not bend and the leg would not take her weight.

  “Damn you,” she whispered harshly and pounded a fist against the makeshift bandage. “Damn you!”

  Frustration welled, stiffened her arms with unwelcome tension, and finally she lifted her head and shouted at the ceiling, meaningless words and phrases meant to drain her, relax her. Her hands snatched at the air, clawed at the bedclothes, finally found their way around the handle of the brush and flung it viciously across the room. She watched it arc and slam against the wall, the sound of its collision satisfying beyond belief. She grinned, shoved the blanket to uncover the tray, and one at a time, threw plates and lids, glass and silverware after the brush.

  She was brandishing the mirror high over her head when the door slammed open and a man stepped into the room.

  He was as tall as any man she had ever seen, solidly thickset across his shoulders and chest. His hair was nut-brown and fell in almost womanly waves to just above his shoulders and was combed straight back from a high, shining forehead. His brows were thick, his eyes seemed dark, and the planes of his face were handsomely sharp. He scowled when he saw all the litter she had made, then turned to gaze at her steadily. His right hand, gloved in black, brushed idly at the full sleeves of his white shirt, reached up to pull thoughtfully at the points of a gold silk cloth tied loosely around his neck. Then he hooked a thumb into a wide, black belt that shone from constant polishing, a belt that held up dark brown trousers tapering tightly into thigh-high black boots.

  Cass realized she was gaping like a schoolgirl and lowered the mirror slowly.

  The man nodded, lifted to eye level a spiraling silver candelabrum, and walked over to her; setting the sparkling lights down on a battered nightstand beside her. She shrank away from him then, uneasy in the silence he carried across his broad shoulders like a tailored cloak. She had an impulse to speak to him, but something in his demeanor, his absolute control of all in the room, warned her to keep silent. And she did, as he stared down at her, his appraisal frank but not unkind. Then he tossed back the blanket and moved his hands quickly and expertly over her injured leg.

  “Hey!” she protested, and slapped the nearest hand away as she tugged at the blanket to cover herself again.

  His head turned quickly, and she saw that his eyes were as gray as autumn dusk, a smoke-like tint that hardened at her action, then softened as he smiled and nodded again.

  “You’re right, you know,” he said as he perched on the edge of the bed. “I really should have introduced myself first before getting quite so familiar.”

  “Oh, my God!” Cass laughed suddenly and clapped her hands over her mouth to muffle the giggles she could not keep down.

  The man frowned, though not angrily, until she had regained control and was able to pull the blanket to a point just below her neck. “I’m sorry,” she said contritely, still smiling. “But it’s just that, well, when I first woke up, Sara said my being here made two foreigners in the house. I didn’t know what she was talking about until just now.”

  “Ah, yes,” he said, and his face relaxed into a smile as he lifted one leg to cross an ankle over a knee. “You’re from the North, quite obviously. Which makes you a foreigner in Virginia, that’s for certain.”

  “And you,” she said, hoisting herself back to a sitting position. “That accent. Does it mean you’re from England?”

  “Guilty,” he said.

  “Then you must be Mister—you must be Eric.”

  “Caught a second time,” he said.

  “But … what are you doing here? In the United States? And in the middle of a war?”

  “And what are you doing here, in Virginia, in the middle of a war?” he countered gently. He ran his fingers over his boot top, lowered his head and looked up at her from under his heavy brow. “I think, Miss Cassandra Bowsmith, you and I had better trade stories.”

  Chapter Six

  Eric Martingale was the younger of two sons engaged in the running of their family’s firm, a small import concern that had its base in London. Several years after Napoleon had finally been dispatched at Waterloo and relations between the United States and Britain moved slowly—though suspiciously, thanks to the War of 1812—back to a studied, cautious normality. The elder Martingale, Harry, had traveled to America to seek out some means of commercial salvation for his company, now floundering under the aftereffects of too many years of fighting. Rebuffed constantly in the North, he had made his way into Virginia where, not long after he arrived, he arranged for the purchase of Riverrun. The decision had been an impulsive one, definitely forced through more than slight desperation. The rationalization was that Martingale and Sons, Limited, would now be able to eliminate the middle man in a profitable venture that had previously brought larger firms an incredible amount of wealth: the growth and sale of fine Virginia tobacco. Harry had returned to England, Eric said with a wry grin, with visions of knighthood prancing on every enthusiastic word. Unfortunately, however, the overseer he had left in charge of the operation was not nearly as reliable as Harry had judged. The man began thinking of the plantation as his own property, and commenced a long and tedious correspondence that inevitably contained complaints about his salary and working conditions. Despite Eric’s doubts, Harry was bent on appeasing the overseer; Martingale and Sons, he reasoned, was regrettably not among the ranks of companies eternally self-sufficient, and the plantation’s failure could very well mean a disaster of such proportions that the firm might not survive, a firm that had been struggling manfully along since the time of the first of the Tudors.

  “I think,” Eric said, “I was very much the whipping boy in this case, even though it’s obvious it was poor old Harry who had done us in, in a manner of speaking. I was supposed to be the bright one in the family, don’t you see, and even though Father’s death in ’57 gave control of the firm to Harry, it naturally fell to me to come over here to straighten things out and get the gold back into our treasury. It was, in fact, that same year, 1857—that I shipped over here.

  “Being something of a farmer yourself, Cassandra, you’ll appreciate wha
t happened when I arrived. Lambert, the overseer and manager Harry took on for us, had turned Riverrun into his own private empire, such as it is. It did not take me long to uncover dozens of instances of his selling much of the crop on his own and passing off the difference as potential profit being destroyed by inclement weather, poor help, and other such nonsense. The slaves, too, were appallingly ill-treated and Riverrun’s record of those who escaped to the North was probably, the worst in the state, if not the entire South. Immediately I fired him, of course, and set about righting things before it was too late. That, however, proved not to be possible. By the time I had the fields in proper order again and had reestablished our good credit with the right people, this bloody war of yours broke out and I was, in a very real sense, trapped here without recourse to aid or assistance from home.”

  “Surely you’re exaggerating,” Cass said. “You make it sound as though you’ve been besieged in some castle or fort.”

  Eric’s smile was rueful as he nodded. “I very nearly was, believe me. It was the curse of being British. In the South, I was not liked because Great Britain had not come out officially for the Confederate government, and that man Davis obviously needed the supplies Her Majesty could provide him with; in the North it was the same. Britain, it seems, has a devil of a time making up her mind whom to support in a fight. Not surprisingly, she wanted to see who would win before declaring herself the ally of one side or another. And I certainly wouldn’t do anything on my own. To declare for Davis was not only against my country’s policy, but also against my own personal belief. Frankly, slavery found no opinion in me one way or the other until I had seen for myself the dreadful conditions under which those people survived—I hesitate to use the word ‘lived’—and what they could do to a human being like Sara. As a result, my neighbors were not the most friendly people you would want to meet. So you see, I have been rather besieged here for the past several months. The crop will rot because I’ve no one to pick it. I’ve had to grow all my own food; and now, to get passage back to London, I’ve had to sell at an appalling loss most of the furniture and additions from the house. I’ll be leaving soon for England, sad to say. There’s no sense in staying on while the fighting continues, and I have a good friend in Philadelphia who will book me passage past the blockade.”