Sarah's Ground (9781439115855)

by Rinaldi, Ann

  “And why not?” I was careful to be chipper and stout of purpose.

  “Because.” She hesitated then and looked from me to Mr. Herbert and back at me again. “It isn’t seemly leaving you here without a chaperone.”

  Mr. Herbert had the grace to blush. I didn’t.

  “This is a time of war,” I told her. “All kinds of unseemly things are going to happen. Look at what happened in Alexandria to that poor Colonel Ellsworth! Anyway, we have the servants. I can’t get a minute’s peace away from Emily or Priscilla. Why, they’re living right in the house with us.”

  She sighed. “Yes, you are right about that. But I don’t want any shadow of suspicion cast on this project.”

  “They’ve already cast shadows,” Mr. Herbert reminded her, “with this business about Washington’s body. Go home, Miss Cunningham. We can stand firm in the face of whatever comes.”

  She finally agreed. If I would put an ad in the Alexandria paper advertising for a woman to come and stay If I would write to my friend Mary McMakin, in Philadelphia, and ask her to come.

  I didn’t want to do either one, but I promised I would. I wanted to be the mistress of Mount Vernon.

  We talked, too, about paying or not paying the Nigras.

  I brought it up before she left.

  “Why, of course we will pay them,” Miss Cunningham said. “I have it in the budget to pay them.”

  Mr. Herbert and I looked at each other.

  “Why do you seem confused?” she asked.

  “You are from South Carolina,” I managed to say.

  “We thought …,” said Mr. Herbert, and he waved a hand to dismiss the thought.

  “You thought that because I own slaves, I would not pay for these people. But they are not my people,” she said. “And the Association must pay them. Or we will be criticized. It is very important, Mr. Herbert. They must be recompensed for their services. Do you hear?”

  “I hear,” he said.

  “Then, they are free?” I asked.

  But that would be taking it too far. For both of them.

  “They work for us,” Miss Cunningham said simply.

  “They won’t go anywhere,” Mr. Herbert promised.

  But were they free? I knew that to push the point would be to create chaos here. And what we were doing, keeping Mount Vernon in order, was more important right now than creating chaos.

  So I kept silent. For the moment.

  I had to help Miss Cunningham pack, then Dandridge drove us to Alexandria. I stayed in Alexandria with her until she boarded her boat. “I will be back soon,” she said, “I promise.”

  The trip home, for me, was uneventful.

  Six

  Here are some of the things that have happened so far in June.

  Mr. Herbert had to dismiss a man for drinking, and we found he was in Alexandria sending bad messages to the men here, trying to get them to leave our employ.

  I received a box of preserves and orange syrup from Mother.

  Mr. Herbert had two washstands in his room and he gave me one.

  Dandridge was stopped and searched when he brought a load of cabbages to Alexandria to sell. How could they be suspicious of Dandridge? He is gentlemanly and efficient, our all-around man. I would trust him with my life.

  All the rooms have been swept and cleaned, even in the garret. I wanted to cut some carpet for the rooms upstairs, but the workmen were sanding that side of the house and had all the windows closed, and I did not have enough light.

  A man in Alexandria is making us a simple but rich single bedstead for fourteen dollars. And a tufted haircloth mahogany chair for thirteen dollars. Mr. Herbert has a black walnut dining-room extension table in his house that we may borrow. He has brought other items from his house. He calls his place Bleak House. It seems to fit him somehow. He is so very proper. I don’t know why Miss Cunningham worried about leaving us together. We work well together, respect and understand each other. Of course, I have not told my people at home yet that she has left. I think Fanny would get on the first train and come right down and fetch me. Well, good that there is a war on, then. Aren’t there such things as enemy lines? If not, there soon will be, and she will be unable to come by the time I tell her Miss Cunningham has left. If I ever do.

  We must buy some dining-room chairs.

  I have gotten a woman to come in once a week to do the washing.

  The house sits between the Federal pickets at Arlington and the Confederate muster point at Manassas Junction. A Union commander is said to be occupying Robert E. Lee’s house at Arlington, and roads have been made, trees cut down, and earthworks dug all around Lee’s place. I understand it was once very beautiful and that when she left, Mrs. Lee was crying.

  We paid the servants, finally, one day in June.

  “What this be for?” Priscilla asked as Mr. Herbert put the money in her hand. He had assembled them in the foyer, and Priscilla was the first one to feel the money.

  “It’s your pay,” he said.

  In each hand he put some money. And they were in wonderment, like children on Christmas Day.

  “We kin spend this?” Dandridge asked.

  “Yes, you may spend it,” Mr. Herbert told them.

  “I save mine,” Emily said. She pressed the hand with the money in it close to her breast. “I heared about slaves who buy their own freedom.”

  Mr. Herbert and I looked at each other significantly. He appeared to be uncomfortable then and had to clear his throat, and he said something noble to them about how dear they were to him. But neither he nor I said that one of these days their freedom would be given to them. Or that slaves didn’t get paid. Or that, for all intents and purposes, they were free now.

  Or that the only reason they weren’t was because he and I were more confused about the issue than a mule in a mud hut.

  I should have said something, as a representative of the Association. I know Miss Cunningham would have wanted me to. But I thought it was Mr. Herbert’s job. And besides that, I was too much of a prissy boots to begin with.

  I feel like a nest-building bird. What kind of bird, I don’t know. I think I would like to be a cardinal because then my husband’s coat would be bright red.

  Speaking of birds, the house has already given me gifts. I have a pet crow who comes around out back near my vegetable garden and lights on the brick fence around it. Mr. Herbert says he must repair the fence. The workmen around here make their own bricks.

  I didn’t know crows could be so tame. He looks at me with bright eyes and bobs and weaves to get my attention. I give him some bread from the kitchen scraps, and he stays around while I weed the garden. Then he flies away.

  “Didn’t you know crows can be harbingers of bad news?” Mr. Herbert asked me.

  “Now, that seems like a Southern belief,” I told him. “In Troy we don’t think that way. Can’t they also be friendly?”

  He scowled. “Obviously this one intends to be.” But his scowl was friendly. I think he is often amused by me.

  The other gift is the sight of a resident eagle who soars amongst the trees down by the river. Mr. Herbert has been working on the wharf, repairing it, and I have been down there several times watching. He has taken a small boat out to fish for shad, and then he has cooked it as only he knows how.

  I am not much of a cook. At home the kitchen belonged to Mother, and my job was to set the table. We had one housemaid, Ella, a silent, disapproving person who set standards I could never possibly meet.

  I have, in proper order, written to my friend Mary McMakin, in Philadelphia, and asked her to come and be my chaperone.

  She wrote back and said her mother was ill and she could not come at the moment.

  I have put the ad in the Alexandria paper to find a girl to come and stay with me. It seems so silly. What will I do with her when she comes? Am I not telling Upton Herbert that I do not trust him by doing this?

  “You must do as you are told,” he admonished me. He was standing
on the wharf, tamping some tobacco into his pipe for a moment’s relaxation. The river and the Maryland shore were behind him. Quite a backdrop. And now that I have been around him for a while, I can describe Mr. Herbert better. He is a lean, brown-eyed man, with the grace of hundreds of years of breeding in his movements. He dresses in brown. His shirts and fingernails are always clean.

  “You speak to me as if I’m a child,” I said.

  “Aren’t you still?”

  “I’m a woman of twenty-two.”

  “If that is your claim.”

  “What mean you by that, sir?”

  He smiled. “Don’t get on your high horse, but if you’re twenty-two, I’m Napoléon’s nephew.”

  “Do you accuse me of lying?”

  “Just stretching the truth a bit for your own ends.”

  “I’m-twenty-two.”

  He drew a letter out of his coat pocket. “I have proof here that states otherwise.”

  My heart dropped inside me. I reached for the letter, but he pulled back.

  “Who is it from?” I asked.

  “Mrs. Francis Knudson.”

  I gasped. “My sister, Fanny? She wrote to you? On what pretext?”

  “Just to tell me that you are only eighteen.”

  “Oh!” I had no words. I had only anger, then feelings of betrayal and hurt. “She had no right. She’s always tried to hurt me and stop me from doing things. Oh, the witch.”

  “Now, now, she’s an older sister.”

  “I hate her. She’s ruined everything for me.”

  “Nothing is ruined,” he said. “The information will go no further.”

  I hesitated a moment. “Why would you do that for me?”

  “Because I think you are right for the job. You belong here, as do I. You appreciate the place for what it is.”

  How could I be angry at that assessment? Oh, he had me so confused. I turned to look up at the house. “I feel as if I belong here,” I said.

  “And so you do. I’ve seen some of your letters to Miss Cunningham. They seem to echo Mr. Washington’s when he was away at war, writing home.”

  “They do?”

  “Yes. I’ll show you how they resemble each other sometime,”

  “But what will we do about Fanny?”

  He thought for a moment. “I’ll write to her and tell her I’ll take the matter up with Miss Cunningham and we’ll abide by her wishes.”

  “You’d lie for me?”

  “I can tell a judicious lie sometimes. Look, we’re at war. You are settled in here. Miss Cunningham s health is fragile, and anyway, she can’t travel through the lines now. It would be worse not to lie at this point. Ohh. I think we have guests.” He laid down his hammer and ruler and nails. “Soldiers.”

  They were from the Union army. Five of them. They explained they were stationed near here and wanted to see Washington’s tomb. One was a boy of only about seventeen. “Want to see if he’s still here,” he said.

  I saw in Mr. Herbert’s face and demeanor the angry superintendent warring with the Southern gentleman, and I stepped in.

  “I’ll gladly show it to you,” I said, “if you check your guns here at the gate and put on other clothing.”

  “We’re Union, ma’am. And we don’t give up our arms.”

  “I don’t want your old arms,” I answered. “I wouldn’t know what to do with them. But I ask you to respect the dead and the fact that this place is neutral ground.”

  “By whose order?” the only officer with them said.

  “General Winfield Scott,” I lied.

  “Well, we don’t have other clothes, ma’am,” the officer said.

  “Then, wait here. I’ll go into the house and get something for you to cover your markings of rank with. That is the only way you can approach General Washington’s tomb, I’m afraid.”

  I sounded braver than I felt. But they waited. I ran into the house and, seeing Emily in the hall, grabbed the shawl from around her shoulders. “Go and find me four more,” I ordered.

  “What you doin’ with my shawl?” she asked.

  “Never mind, I’ll return it immediately. Do as I say.”

  In several minutes she came back with four more shawls. Two were mine. I ran outside again and down to where the soldiers were standing with Mr. Herbert. Would grown men agree to put shawls around their shoulders like little old ladies? Would they agree to leave their guns at the gate?

  “Gentlemen.” I held up the shawls.

  “You can’t expect me to put that on, ma’am,” the youngest soldier said.

  “And why not?”

  “It’s like my granny wears.”

  “Respect,” I said. “If I had blankets enough, I’d give you those. Just pretend they are blankets. And think of the story you’ll have to tell your grandchildren. You actually visited George Washington’s tomb.”

  There was some mumbling, but they took the shawls and draped them around their shoulders. “Anybody tell anybody back in camp about this an’ you’re dead meat,” the officer threatened.

  “We all got the same secret,” one of the others said.

  They left their guns and we went down the hill to Washington’s tomb. We stood outside the cast-iron gate reflectively. They took off their hats.

  “Just wanted to pay our respects, sir,” the officer said.

  Tears came to my eyes. Overhead I heard my eagle calling. If I were given to conjure, like the Nigras, I’d say it was a sign. But I am a good Yankee, believing in no such nonsense.

  At the top of the hill again, they handed back the shawls, offered Mr. Herbert some money, and picked up their rifles. “Thank you, ma’am,” the youngest one said.

  As we watched them walk away Upton looked at me. “I told you you belonged here,” he said, “but you’d better get the matter official. With General Scott, I mean.”

  As my eagle soared gracefully overhead I promised him I would. I was flush with success. I felt as if I could accomplish anything.

  Seven

  I have met some of the neighbors. I think they are all Quakers, although we have one foot-washing Baptist in the person of Mrs. Jean Harbinger. She came around one day bearing a pecan pie. She is a tall, sad woman who lost one son when he fell from a horse and broke his neck. She came with another, named Robert. He is about seventeen and completely under his mother’s domination. She should send him away to school instead of keeping him wrapped around her like a shawl.

  She wears grief on her like a shawl too. It even shows in her walk, which is languid and reluctant, as if she really has no place to go and nothing to look forward to.

  She is the one who told me we are surrounded by a Quaker settlement. That all of George Washington’s farms were purchased by Quakers.

  “He hated Quakers,” she told me, as if she knew him personally. “They thwarted all his war aims in the Jersey legislature. You watch. The ones around here won’t be found if there is trouble in the neighborhood. They’ll hide in their cellars.”

  “That isn’t quite right, Mother,” Robert told her. “There are a lot of Quakers who have sons in gray right now. And some who have sons in blue.”

  She told him to hush. I made her tea, and she spoke of her boy Donnie as if he were still with her. Then she spoke about the neighborhood.

  “Many Quaker Friends fled to New Jersey when it looked like there was going to be war,” she said, “but they have all returned. The big house on Union Farm, half a mile from your west gate, has been reopened. And there are lights on at Walnut Hill.”

  She knew everything about the neighborhood. Then she told me about old Wes Ford, an ex-slave man who is living nearby.

  “He came to your mansion about 1802,” she said. “When Bushrod Washington inherited the place from the general. And he left with John Augustine’s family. He stayed that long, though he’d been set free in his masters will in 1829. One thing about the Nigras around here. They don’t want to leave. Robert, pour me another cup of tea.”

&n
bsp; He poured it.

  “So Mr. Herbert told me,” I said.

  “Wes Ford can tell stories about the general and his wife. Stories told to him by Billy, the general’s body servant himself. Billy was still living here when Wes Ford came in 1802.”

  Then, having won my interest, she gave the conversation a turn.

  “Funny, isn’t it? You and Mr. Herbert living all alone here in this big house.”

  “Mr. Herbert is going to start a Home Guard. I’m going to ask him to teach me how to shoot,” Robert said.

  “Robert, you are not going to learn how to shoot. Now, we have discussed this.”

  “We’re not alone,” I said. Robert’s young, handsome face was flushed. He reminded me of Charles, my first love.

  “Oh? I’d heard that the lady from the Association had a sick mother. Didn’t she go home to her?”

  I was trapped. “Yes, she did. But we have four servants, three of them women. And I’m actively seeking a female companion.” I looked at her. “Do you want the job?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Do you want to come and live here with me and help guard my virtue?”

  She looked flustered. “Dear me, no. I’m not insinuating anything. I don’t wish you to take it that way. Heavens, I’ve known Mr. Herbert for years. We all have. He is so full of decorum he could pass for Saint Joseph in the dark.”

  I had never liked Saint Joseph. I didn’t think much of a man who’d allow angels to tell him how to conduct his marriage.

  Then she got up. “Come, Robert, it is time to go.” She turned to me. “The good Lord has his plan. I’m sure you will find someone.”

  “I’m sure I will.”

  “He knew what he was doing when he took my Donnie. At least Donnie won’t have to go fight in the war and get himself killed.”

  I did not understand such convoluted reasoning. But then, I did not know how a mother felt who had lost a son. I did know that if it happened to me, I wouldn’t go around telling people that the Lord knew what he was doing. And I wouldn’t make my other son pay for it either.

  The next who came to visit was Anne Frobel, a Quaker woman.