The Black Swan

by Day Taylor

  Adam 1852-1859

  Chapter One

  A land of bakingly hot summers, white with cotton, green with tobacco and sugarcane, scented by magnolia and gardenia, drenched in sudden rainstorms from cloud-piled blue skies, gave birth to a special breed of man. It was a land whose climate and weather determined its soil, its crops, its way of life. Growing seasons were long, the pace of living leisurely, its men soft-spoken, and its charming women protected.

  The land was the Deep South before the War of Secession. The year, 1852.

  Tom Pierson, Edmund Revanche, and Ross Bennett relaxed in the Orleans Club, playing brag. Together, in the usual way of Southern gentlemen, they had hunted bob-white and wild turkey, easily gambled a hundred dollars on a single roll of the dice, and easily smiled at loss.

  This day the trio was alert and watchful as Edmund Revanche closed upon the ownership of Josiah Whin-bum's plantation. Marsh House. Inexorably, Edmund had been maneuvering Whinbum to place his plantation in the pot. The other two played with cool precision, neither approving nor disapproving Edmund's implacability.

  They presented a solid front of friendship. They had squired chaperoned belles, savored the delights of bordellos. Ross had killed a Northerner over a business matter. Edmund had married at twenty-three. Two years later he was widowed without issue. Tom and Ross had not yet married.

  Each was w^ dressed, athletically graceful, restless, and gallant. Swift to both murderous rage and gracious forgiveness, they were more inclined to physical action than intellectual achievement. They were the self-confident products of a doomed civilization.

  Edmund barely stifled his grin as Josiah Whinbum stared bleakly at his losing hand.

  *'This isn't your day, Josiah," Tom said "Want us to deal you out?"

  "What do I owe you now?"

  "You can make it up in the next hand," Edmund said. "Put up Marsh House."

  Josiah looked uncertain. "My daddy'd roll in his grave."

  "Put up the cane crop," Ross suggested. "Do somethin*. We*re not gonna sit here all night. You in or out?"

  Goaded, Whinbum said hastily, "I'm in. I'll put up the cane crop."

  Edmund smiled. Ross began to deal.

  Tom watched the sweat-beaded young man. "Josiah, you sure about this?"

  "Hell's bells," said Ross. *Tom boy, you're always wet-nursin' somebody. Gonna land you in a pile o' trouble someday."

  Tom grinned, deaf to jibes about his easy sympathies. He had mild blue eyes set in a pleasant, clean-shaven face. His thick sandy hair, wild with waves and opposing cowlicks, fell in an unruly mass onto his collar. A stocky man with big hands, he was heavy in the shoulders and without the fashionable tapering at waist and hips. He could never achieve titie smoothly tailored elegance that sat so cozily on the long-limbed bodies of the other two. Torti Pierson all his life would look like a dressed-up bull.

  Tom played his cards without any sign of his distaste for the proceedings. Repeatedly, Josiah's eyes sought his. Finally Tom complained, "I've had a bellyful of brag."

  "Last hand." Ross dealt, waiting for Josiah to ante his cane crop. He patted Josiah on the back. *That's the spirit, boy! We've all lost an' won back all we own."

  Ross Bennett's straight brown hair was matched by a drooping moustache and sideburns that stopped cleanly at the level of his full, sensuous lips. He was saved from overwhelming beauty by a high-bridged nose that gave him the aristocrat's permanent sneer.

  Of the trio, Edmund Revanche was the most calculating and ambitious. He was graced with a cynicism that allowed his morality to shift with the needs of expediency. His face was inherited from his French Creole father. From his high narrow forehead sprang fine black hair mingled sparsely with gray. Under hooded lids, his brown eyes moved suspiciously. His nose was long and straight, with deep grooves on each side running down toward thin lips.

  He was a man of exquisite tastes with ample means to indulge them, a discreet, almost secretive man who lived excessively and had a constitution that shrugged off as nothing the most flamboyant of his excesses.

  Revanche, like the others, had come into his patrimony at twenty-one. Unlike Ross, who in a few years would exhaust his, and Tom, who allowed other men to manage it for him, Edmund handled his own affairs. His large sugar plantation twenty-five miles east of New Orleans was prospering. Recently he'd paid gold for the extensive adjoining property and fifteen slaves willed by Old Man Pickett to his charmingly helpless young widow.

  It was not incidental to Edmund's plan that Josiah Whinburn's property connected to Pickett's. Windfalls were the stuff of which Edmund Revanche would build an empire. Soon, Edmund would possess a considerable amount of Whinljurn money and the cane crop. Without capital for the coming year, Josiah would gamble Marsh House. Or be forced to sell.

  "You still playin', Edmund?" Ross asked peevishly. "Josiah's sho' got us whupped."

  Edmund looked into Josiah's face, bright with anticipation and relief. One at a time he laid down his cards. With each card the young man's face fell, until it looked as if he might weep.

  Josiah rose, bowed to Edmund, and gestured toward the note on the table. "Excuse me for a moment, gentlemen. I feel the call of nature."

  Tom had a flash of insight: Good God! The boy*s goin* to blow his brains out! "Mind if I trail along, Josiah?"

  Out of Edmund's hearing, he said, "Know anythin* about keepin' accounts?"

  "Is that meant for an insult?"

  "Great Jehoshaphat! You're mighty touchy. Tm askin' if you can do figures and keep track of crates and hogsheads and suchlike."

  "I beg your pardon, Tom, I sho'ly do. Losin's got me crazy as a bessie bug. I used to do accounts for my daddy."

  "Come to my house on Clio Street, Thursday evenin'. I want your word you're gonna be there, hear?"

  "Well, I . . . You've got my word."

  "Jes' fine! Now, come on, boy, let's us go get drank as ten ol' boar hogs!"

  Inside the club, Tom pounded on the bar with his huge

  fist. "Gentlemen! GentlemenI I'm proposin' a drinkin* match. Edmund won himself a right smart pile o' money. We're gonna celebrate this grand occasion with wine, women, and song! 'Course the women'U have to wait!" He paused for the coarse laughter to die down. "Anybody willin'?"

  From all over the room there came shouts of "I'm on!" and "I'll take a shot at it!" and more laughter.

  "I'm gonna put a thousand dollars in the purse. All you boys with real sportin' blood ante up!" Tom shouted.

  More shouts, laughter, and jibes came for those who backed down. Twenty-five men had agreed. The purse was locked in the club's safe. Then the requirements for the match were set.

  "Eight bottles of wine apiece!" cried Josiah.

  "Nine bottles!" said Ross, who knew Josiah's capacity.

  '*Make it ten," growled a beefy planter.

  Edmund's voice rang out. "Twelve bottles each man, an' a quart of anisette."

  Josiah, visibly pale, echoed, *Twelve bottles an' one of anisette!"

  "Done!" Tom poimded on the bar again. "On a purse of one thousand apiece, awarded the first man finished."

  The first bottles of wine were set out. Some men dropped out relatively sober, mounted their horses, and headed dreamily toward less incapacitating pleasures. Josiah drank too quickly. In a remarkably short time he reached oblivion and was carried to the gargonniere to sleep it off.

  The evening gun had long ago sounded. In the dimly lighted room a dozen young gentlemen in their cups raised an unseemly din. Black waiters ran to constant calls of, "Boy! 'Nother bottle heah!"

  Edmund, sipping on his seventh bottle, felt heavy-eyed. He lifted his brows. Ross and Tom were still joking and slapping each other's shoulders.

  An argument would clear his head. Edmund put
one hand on Tom's arm, making Tom splash wine onto his coat sleeve. Unmindful of Tom's irritated outcry, Edmund said, "Where do you think the South would be if ol* Hen-Hennery Clay hant puh-puhposed his Com-puh-mise? Jus' tell me that."

  It angered Edmund that the Compromise of 1850, with its stringent law requiring all persons to assist in the return

  The Black Swan n

  of fugitive slaves to their masters, could not be enforced. Once a fugitive reached a free state, the nigger-lovers were willing to flout Federal law. Aided by darkness, they guided the fugitives toward Canada.

  "Well, Edmund, no law could keep us from bein' right heah. We'd be sittin' in the Orleans Club gettin' drunk."

  Ross Bennett laughed, then hiccuped. "Yeah, Edmund, we'd be heah with the nigras still scamperin' to follow our orders. No pukin' law is gonna change us.'*

  Revanche signaled for his eighth bottle. "Like hell!'* He glared savagely. "Last month ol' Daddy Bill an' his woman got clean away. Never even rousted the hounds. Black bastards! Two best house niggers I'll ever see. I don't take kindly to any law tamperin' with my business, 'specially nigger property valuable as mine. I only keep the finest."

  "What'd you do 'bout it?" Ross licked his lips in sly amusement.

  "Flogged 'em. Every damned nigger in their cabin.*' Revanche said, enjoying Tom's sudden pallor. "Happened your precious UUah was servicin' my guest, so she didn't get it—then. Wish like hell I could lay hands on the damned doughface that gave them the idea. Jesus, but I hate an insurrectionist!"

  "Maybe if you'd go a mite easier, your people wouldn't run."

  Ross snorted. "Catch old Tom! Ten house niggers he can't get to do a lick, an' now he's tellin' you how to run a fifteen-hundred-acre plantation!"

  Tom thought of his elegant Greek Revival mansion on Clio Street, clean and polished, lavish menus prepared daily, spotless brick walks, and formal gardens, all pride-fully tended by loving black hands. He thought of the whip he'd nailed over the kitchen door on the day his father died. "My people do their work to suit me. Matter, Ross, quit drinkin' already?"

  Ross drained his glass. "I aim to win that purse, Tom boy."

  Revanche reached unsteadily for his wine and knocked it over. Tom jumped up, his coat and trousers stained red. "Great J'hoshaphat, Edmund! You tryin' to fumigate me?"

  " 'Pologies." Edmund clutched at the table for balance. "I don't appear to have the proper function of my hands f'some reason. Y'all comin' to the house later on?"

  Tom said, "Sure."

  "Or Tom don't want to risk his life spendin' the night in the bachelor house. He wants cool quadroon han's on his fevered—" Ross laughed.

  Tom grinned with the sudden knowledge that he was going to win the purse. Casually confident, he sipped on his ninth bottle. He hardly felt giddy yet.

  Sometime later Ross got up, reeling unsteadily toward the outhouse, and relieved himself instead into a brass spittoon. A waiter hurried to carry it out. Ross swung his fist at the man, missed, and turned in a dizzying circle. With peaceful suddenness, his knees buckled.

  Tom grinned vacuously as the first of his two most serious competitors went down. Edmund's head lolled. Tom had never seen Revanche so sloppy drunk, yet he was midway into his tenth bottle. At this rate, Edmund would be awake to the very last. He looked around. Three men sat at a table near the back door. One sat rigid as death, his eyes shut, his jaw slack. He looked at his own bottle. Number eleven and nothing left but the dregs.

  Tom stood up. His head was buzzing like a beehive, and he was walkin' whopperjawed. How'd he get himself into this bambache? Sho', get Josiah drunk so's he wouldn't kill himself.

  Edmund swung his head around. *Tom! Where a hell you goin'?"

  "Don't stay awake on my account, Edmund ol' frien*. Drink up!"

  "Sinsh when you tell me ... wha' to do?*'

  "I don't tell you. I jus' sit here an' guzzle it down. Ever notice how the taste goes flat?"

  Edmund took a long swallow. "No, I don't believe I do. No diffnce a-tall." As he looked at Tom, his eyes slowly crossed.

  "Ballsafire, Emmun', I never seen you so drunk! You better quit while I can still git you home!"

  Edmund drank again deeply. "You never outdrunk me yet."

  "Le's talk. Keep awake. Nobody lef 'cept us." He swept his hand over the room; the revelers had all been helped into their carriages or to the gargonniere.

  "Talk! Whadda we talk about?"

  "Money. You like money, don't you, Emmun'?"

  Revanche sat there smiling for some time. "Got Josiah's, dint I?"

  "Fm talkin' 'bout my money. I'll give you some of my money."

  Edmund blinked rapidly several times. "Wha' for?"

  "I wanta buy UUah."

  "You're gettin' all the cream off that cow anyway. Wha —wha—"

  "I need me a house servant. Bessie's gettin' too ol'."

  "Whash"—Edmund blinked and glared horribly trying to keep his eyes open—"your . . . offer? Whash your offer?"

  If he offered too little, Edmund would refuse. "Thirty-five hunnert."

  Edmund leaned toward him. "Make you a bargain. Four thousand."

  "Shit, four thousand ain't no bargain. Get me a edu-edu . . . get me one can read for tha' much."

  "Lemme finish. Four thousand, gold, and you gotta out-drink me."

  "Emmun', you b—bas—^you bass-turd, your price is too high."

  Edmund's eyes closed. He popped them open. "Fair's fair. Bargain's a bar . . ." For a moment Tom thought he'd passed out.

  Tom nudged him. "Shake hands, an' drink up, ol' frien'I We got a deal. Four thousand an' I drink you unner th' table, an' Ullah belongs to me." He had to look away then. As drunk as he was, he still couldn't let Edmund see how much it meant to him.

  Tom grasped Edmund's limp hand. "You're fallin' behind, Emmun'!" he said heartily. "A toast! To rtiy new house nigger!"

  "Damn if you'll get 'er," Edmund crashed his glass against Tom's. His eyes fell shut. Soon he was snoring, his cheek pillowed in spilled wine.

  Tom motioned to the bartender. "You countin' the bottles, Jarvis?"

  "Yassuh, Mastah Tom. Mastah Edmun' don& quit on bottle numbah eleven."

  "Anybody else outdrink him?"

  Jarvis's black face split in a grin. "Ah b'lieve you finish yo' bottle numbah twelve, suh. All de odder gent'mens gone to sleep out back."

  "Fetch me the anisette, Jarvis. An' fetch over that big spittoon, 'cause I declare I'm gonna need it."

  "Don't drink dat stuff, Mastah Tom. It look like watah, but dat bottleful gwine kill you."

  "Won' hurt me." Tom took a few sips. His stomach rolled in rebellion.

  Jarvis's face puckered. "Mastah Tom, you ain't lookin* so fine. You already won de bambache, but you cain't coUec' if you dies."

  "Fair's fair." Suddenly Tom's words slurred, his head reeled. "Got to drink the res'. Made a deal."

  Tom rocked himself desperately back and forth to stay awake. He sipped the anisette. Behind the bar, Jarvis and the other waiters whispered. Jarvis came toward him smiling. To Tom the black man's face looked like a big dark moon glaring hideously. He shut his eyes to blot out the distortion.

  Jarvis touched him, making him jump. Had he almost been asleep?

  "We made a 'rangement, suh. We gwine keep de bottle an' bring it you w'en you ready. Yassuh, we gwine he'p you win dat nigger."

  As time slid by, the liquor seemed to lose its usual tang and odor. It looked like water. It tasted like water. The whole world was going crazy. The waiters seemed a-bustin' to take turns serving him, but then they giggled and spilled things. Not a one of them was walking straight. He'd almost think they were getting drunk too.

  Tom's real prize was Ullah. UUah, his caramel-and-cream quadroon love. At first he'd just used her as Edmund's guests were invited to do. But he had been her first man. He remembered Ullah's sweetness, her innocent love when she told him she would bear his child. "Only gwine be one man Ah 'Hows give me children, Tom." Her shy humor, her
patience, and her unending affection overwhelmed him. Long before Angela was bom, Tom was slaphappy in love with Ullah.

  Yet he did nothing. He knew Edmund. If Tom asked to buy Ullah, right quick Ullah would become too valuable for Edmund to part with. Worse, Edmund might sell her.

  But tonight! Edmund would never remember, but he'd take Tom's word. And bet your boots, Edmund would ask Jarvis, just to make sure.

  "Jarvis!"

  "Yassuh!" Jarvis beamed fit to blind Tom. "You ready fo' de las' glass?"

  Tom's stomach jumped uneasily. "Hoi* off on that. Lis'n, Jarvis, 'member how much I 'greed to pay Emmun' for my house nigger?"

  The black face took on a crafty look. "Ah wa'n't lis'nin', Mastah Tom."

  "Grea' day, Jarvis! It's yo' duty to lis'n! Emmun' gon' ast you!"

  " 'Spect Ah do 'member," Jarvis smiled happily. Tom shut his eyes against the flash of teeth. "Fo' thousan' dollahs, gold. She mus' be some fancy house nigger!"

  Two of the waiters were circling slowly in a dance, while a third beat rhythm. As Tom watched, one of the dancers fell over. The others burst into hilarious laughter, picked him up, and staggered out with him.

  Tom pointed. "Wha—?"

  Jarvis laughed richly. "He plumb tuckered out, suh. This yo' las' glass."

  "Po' it on out, then, an' hoi' that gobboon up heah, 'cause it's comin' right back up. Then you get us in the carriage, so's we can go to Emmun's."

  "Mastah Ross an' Mastah Edmun', dey's asleep, Mastah Tom."

  "They won't gi' you any trouble." Tom shut his eyes tight and downed the anisette, as choky-strong as ever. He felt as if he'd been hit with a mallet. But he had won.

  Chapter Two

  The soiree at Pickett's plantation was in full swing. Miss Carrie's beautiful old rosewood piano tinkled accompaniment to her silvery soprano voice, raised in a haunting new tune, "My Old Kentucky Home." She'd be going back to Kentucky soon.

  She hadn't been able to make her late husband's plantation pay. She didn't lack the spirit. Though she had tried hard for three years, a succession of overseers and factors had taken advantage of her ignorance and good nature, robbing her shamefully. But for Edmund—who must have been a little sweet on her—she'd be sitting on the doorstep of the poorhouse.