She realized then that her grandmother was getting ahead of her. She stared at the curlicued scrawl at the head of the page, the ink faded to a ghost of its original sharpness.
Abruptly, Granny Fitzpatrick closed the heavy Bible.
“There’s a better way, Lilah. You’ll feel it more on the very spot where all the evil started. Get a shawl, girl. Must be cool and damp out by now.”
“Where are you taking me, Granny?”
“To the place our folks lay sleeping. You might even get to meet some of ’em, visiting as we are on this of all nights. Some say the spirits come back to take another look around on All Hallows’ Eve. But I been there to the graveyard many a year on this night to get grave dirt for my conjure bags and ain’t seen a soul yet—living or otherwise.” The old woman hawked a laugh at her macabre joke.
Lilah was weary from the emotional impact of the long evening. Her nerves tingled and she jumped at the slightest sound. The waning moon cast eerie shadows all around them, and the waving moss on the oaks made her think of the ghost, Long Arms, the slaves whispered about, who supposedly snatched unwary night travelers from their paths. Long Arms’ victims disappeared mysteriously and forever.
“Step lively, girl,” Granny urged. “We’ve a ways to go.”
They were skirting the swamp, Lilah could tell by the pungent, earthy smells—the aroma of death transformed into life, only to die again.
Dark shapes darted at them out of the night, diving, swooping.
“Bats!” Granny grumbled, holding her walking stick up to ward them off. “Hurry along, Lilah!”
A shrill scream split the silence. Lilah answered it with a cry of fear and hastened to catch up with her grandmother.
“Settle down, girl! Ain’t nothing but a old Lord-God bird singin’ his night song,” Granny reassured her.
They trudged the narrow, overgrown path for almost a mile. Coming around a bend, Lilah gasped as a giant figure loomed before them.
“Ain’t no reason to fear him now, Lilah. That’s only a graven image of old Simon Patrick, made of granite as hard and cold as his worm-eaten heart. He’s the cause of all our misery, may his soul know the eternal fires of hell!” Granny spat on the ground to seal her curse.
Cautiously, Lilah approached the neatly tended graveyard where the statue marking Simon Patrick’s final resting place dominated the scene. The whole area lay enclosed in a fence of rusting iron lacework. The granite footstone at the gate proclaimed boldly: PATRICK.
“Not that way, Lilah,” Granny instructed. “Over to the back, past the stone wall. We ain’t good enough to be buried in the same plot with them Patricks, or so they say,” she grumbled.
A sudden gust of wind sent dead leaves flying about them. Lilah shivered, although the air was unusually warm.
Granny chuckled softly, and said, “Old Simon knows we’re here. That was the hot breath of damnation that just blew over us.” She stopped and shook her fist toward his grave. “You ain’t licked us yet, old man! There’s still fight left in us Fitzpatricks!”
“Granny, I don’t understand. Who was he?”
Granny pointed her walking stick toward a live oak almost as large as Lilah’s favorite tree.
“It happened right there on that very spot, Lilah. We call that the Fitzpatrick oak. Lord Robert sired two sons, you see. Problem is, there ain’t no papers to show that he ever married Geraldine Smythe. He did lay claim to their son, Fitzgerald, though, and his is the seed we sprung from. Five years later, Lord Robert had another son, Simon, by a woman he was married to legal and proper.”
Lilah followed Granny into the back graveyard, listening intently to her explanations. The old woman bowed her head before a tomb carved in the shape of an oak cut down in its prime. Then she held the lantern closer and ordered, “Read the inscription, Lilah.”
Lilah knelt among the encroaching weeds and brambles. She could just make out the words:
FITZGERALD PATRICK
Beloved Son Of
Robert And Geraldine
Struck Down in The Fullness Of Life
By A Brother Who Was No Brother.
May God Protect What This Good Man Leaves On Earth.
Obit. 24th March 1780-Aged 27 Yrs. 3 Mos. 15 Days.
Lilah looked up to see tears on her grandmother’s cheeks. “A good man,” she said.
Lilah noticed the tomb next to Fitzgerald’s. His wife, Maureen, lay sleeping beside him. The dates of their deaths stirred her curiosity.
“He and his wife died the same day, Granny. Was it an accident?” Lilah asked.
Granny’s voice hardened. “If you want to call murder an accident! After the war with England, the government granted Rainbow Hammock to Fitzgerald and Simon together for their patriotic service. Fitz was willin’ to share and share alike. But Simon didn’t cotton to the idea of splittin’ the bounty. Shot his brother down right there under that oak. When Maureen seen what happened, she grabbed the gun—and it still smokin’—out of Simon’s hand and put a end to her own self. Said she couldn’t live without her man, she loved him that much!” Granny held the lantern up and looked closely at Lilah. “According to the stories been passed down, you favor Maureen a good deal—same eyes, same silvery hair.”
Lilah shivered, thinking of the portrait of Maureen she had seen so often at Fortune’s Fancy. No one had ever told her before of her great-great-grandmother’s tragic end. She touched Maureen’s small stone and it warmed under her palm.
“But, if they both died, how could we have descended from them, and why is our name different?”
Granny took Lilah’s hand and led her to a nearby monument, simple of structure, but powerful in its design.
“This here’s their only son, Gerald. He must have been a spunky lad, full of piss and vinegar!” She chuckled softly. “Defied old Simon at every turn—even changed his last name to Fitzpatrick to show they was two different breeds of dog. Said he’d rather live in a shack on a few acres of his own than under the same roof with the man who murdered his pa. So that’s what old Simon give him, and here we still are. Gerald was my husband’s pa. I never knew him. Died mysterious, he did. Story was he slipped into a quicksand bog one night while he was out ‘coon huntin’. Ain’t likely, though. He knew every quagmire and sink hole on this island, from what I hear tell. He ain’t really buried here. They never hauled his remains out—just stuck up a old wooden cross in the swamp to mark the spot. My guess is he had some help failin’ in!”
Lilah felt her skin crawl at the thought of her great-grandfather’s remains somewhere in that dismal swamp. No wonder the slaves refused to go there unless persuaded by the whip. Her attention snapped back when she realized Granny had moved on some distance ahead of her. She hurried to catch up. When Lilah reached the dots of light cast by the pierced-tin lantern, she read the name JONATHAN FITZPATRICK.
“Here’s where I’ll be layin’ soon,” Granny whispered, as if not wishing to disturb her husband’s eternal sleep “Beside my man, and a good one he was. We married in 1811, and he was killed in the war the very next year, right before our twins, Horace and Jennifer, was born.” The old woman’s voice took on a faraway tone. “Now they’re both gone, too. You’re all I got left, Lilah. The last of the Fitzpatrick line. Remember where you come from and what’s rightly yours. If it wasn’t for old Simon’s murderin’ soul, you’d be living in the big house right now. Got as much right to it as them Patricks! Surely would do my old heart good to see you own it someday.”
Lilah felt her throat constrict at her grandmother’s words.
“What is it, child?” Granny asked, hearing a soft sob from Lilah.
“Oh, Granny, it’s Brandon Patrick. He’s going to be married… to Saralyn Habersham. They announced it at the ball.”
Granny put a consoling arm about Lilah’s shoulders. “And you wanted him, eh?”
Lilah could only nod her reply.
“I had my suspicio
ns, but I could of told you, honey. Did you know Ames Patrick courted your own ma? She came to the island to work as a seamstress for old Simon’s fifth and last wife, Bessie. Poor Katy was plumb swept off her feet. Then, quick as you please, a match was made for Ames Patrick with that Elizabeth Ryan—one of the Ryans of Savannah. My Horace had been pinin’ away for Katy. He made her a good husband and gave her a beautiful daughter. I don’t want you goin’ through the same misery your ma suffered.”
Lilah stared at her grandmother, amazed. She would never have thought of her mother and Ames Patrick together.
“Come over here, child. Time we was headin’ home, but first I need to relieve old Simon of some of his hallowed ground.”
Lilah felt a sudden shudder of dread. The spirits of Fitzgerald, Maureen, Gerald, and all the others seemed to be hovering about, listening, staring down at her. Though Granny walked this ground with steady assurance, Lilah stumbled over rough spots and snagged her dress on brambles. She cried and fought when a wet, invisible tree spider’s web caught in her hair and glued itself to her face.
Granny was out of sight now, beyond the dividing wall. The only sound Lilah could hear was the unnerving scrape, scrape of earth being dug from a grave. She stepped carefully, trying to avoid treading on any of her sleeping ancestors.
A whisper reached her ear: “Lilah… Lilah… Lilah,” it seemed to be saying. The rational side of her mind told her it was only the wind sighing through the branches overhead, but the part of the brain that manufactures nightmares insisted that the dead were calling out to her—beckoning her.
Lilah quickened her pace, no longer bothering to pick her way carefully through the briars. Her heart pounded. She couldn’t find the opening to get out of the enclosure of tombs. She stopped for a moment to try to see her way, but the moon was gone and Granny’s light had disappeared as well. Sudden, unspeakable terror clutched at her. She felt a presence, real and threatening.
“Granny!” she screamed.
A rough hand grabbed at her. The shriek of panic she tried to voice died in her constricted throat.
“Dammit, woman, would you wake up the dead?” a voice growled at her. “What the hell you doin’ out here?”
“Uncle Sim?” Lilah gasped with relief.
He closed hard arms around her and she inhaled his enveloping odor of stale whiskey.
“I ain’t your blood uncle, gal,” he said in a voice oiled with concupiscence. “You know that. I was out here gettin’ a little snatch of pleasurin’, but this here wench ain’t worth a damn. Don’t know nothin’ about a real man. But now you’re here… might not turn out to be a wasted night after all.”
A new kind of horror filled Lilah. There was no mistaking his lecherous intent. She tried to pull away, but Sim Grady held her in a hurting grip.
“No, Uncle Sim, please! I have to find Granny.”
“What’s that old witch doin’ out here? Stealing dirt to put a conjure on me? Well, we’ll just see about that!”
Sim dragged Lilah to a far corner against the stone wall. A young slave girl lay huddled, wild-eyed with fear, where Sim had left her. He kicked her bare bottom and snarled after her as she fled, “Go on, nigger! I got me the gen-u-ine article here. She been gettin’ it from that big, black buck. Kingdom. Ought to be good and seasoned.”
Lilah gasped, “No, Uncle Sim, I never…!”
Granny raised her head from her digging when she heard the slave girl’s yelp of pain at Sim’s kick.
“Lilah,” she called. “Where are you, Lilah?”
“Here, Granny! Help me!” Lilah cried out frantically.
Sim clapped a dirty hand over her mouth and snapped, “Shut up! You hear me, gal? I ain’t lettin’ no old bag spoil my fun! I been waitin’ for this a damn long time! Be nice to old Sim and he’ll make you feel real good!”
Lilah fought to get away, but Sim only laughed at her futile struggle. He was fumbling at the buttons at her bodice when his whole body took a jarring blow. He sank to the ground. Granny materialized from out of nowhere, her trusty walking stick her weapon.
Lilah fell into the old woman’s arms, sobbing.
“Damn his stinkin’, likkered-up soul to hell! Did he hurt you, child?”
“No, Granny. I’m all right now. But you got here just in time. It was awful! He meant to… was going to…” Lilah’s words broke off in sobs.
“Hush now, child,” Granny soothed. “Never you mind. I’ll settle Sim’s hash later. Let’s get on home.”
Back at the house Granny poured Lilah two fingers of blackberry brandy to calm her nerves. The warm nectar burned slightly going down, but immediately relieved some of Lilah’s tension. She sat in a rocker before the fire trying to sort out all the events of the past hours. Granny seemed to sense her confusion.
“Lilah, you’ve got a lot of thinking out to do. But I got a rule for you to remember. My own ma told it to me. A woman needs to marry. A lucky woman marries for love, but it’s got to be a two-way love. I had that with my Jonathan. Iffen you can’t find that, then you settle for marrying to get what you want out of life. You hitchin’ up with Brandon Patrick would have been a mistake. You wait for the right kind of love. You’ll know when it comes along. Your ma knew. She didn’t waste much time nor many tears over the likes of Ames Patrick. My Horace was her man! And you’ll find the one that’s right for you. Mark my words!”
A warm drowsiness settled over Lilah. All thoughts of her unpleasant confrontation with Sim Grady had fled. Granny’s gentle words washed her brain and senses clean, leaving only hope of a new love to come.
“What does it feel like, Granny?” Lilah asked quietly. “Real love, I mean.”
Granny laughed softly. “Oh, child, it’s hard to explain. It’s different things to different folks. I remember the first time I saw my Jonathan, just lookin’ at him near about took my breath away. He was so strong and handsome, but gentlelike too.”
Lilah rocked contentedly, her eyes closed, and let Granny soothe them both with her reminiscences.
“He and his ma came to Charleston to visit my folks. Believe it or not, I was a right pretty thing back in those days—a pert figure and long, silky brown hair. Mrs. Fitzpatrick and Jonathan stayed at our house for about three months. People didn’t go for short visits in those days. A few nights before Jonathan and his ma were to leave and come back here, we had a party. I was pleased as punch at the way all my friends looked at me and Jonathan, and the way he smiled at me could have curled the toes of my slippers. We finished dinner and my pa stood up and announced to everyone that Jonathan Fitzpatrick had asked and received his permission to bundle with me.” The old woman laughed happily, remembering. “Well, Lilah, you could have knocked me over with a feather! I’d never bundled with anyone before, and the thought of doin’ it for the first time with Jonathan fair turned me to jelly!”
Lilah asked sleepily, “What’s bundling, Granny?”
The old woman’s eyes caught the firelight and danced in the darkness.
“Well, child, I’m afraid it’s something you’ll never get to know. People got right prudish a few years later and banned the custom. But it used to be a lovely part of courtin’. Jonathan and me was escorted up to a guest bedroom by my pa. There, a big feather bed had been fixed up with a board right down the middle of it. My Jonathan lay down on one side of that board and I on the other. Oh, we was decent, mind you. I remember I was wearin’ my best white muslin dress. But the grownups left us alone in that bed for a long time. We could talk about everything, and now and again Jonathan would reach over real carefullike and touch my hand. When my pa finally came to get us and take us downstairs again, my Jonathan was all smiles and, I guess, I was all blushes and flusters. Anyway, I knew from the tinglin’ feeling I had all over and the flutterin’ of my insides that there wouldn’t never be another man for me. And I was right!”
Lilah tried to visualize her grandmother as a blushing maiden, but the illusion escaped
her. She concentrated instead on her feelings toward Brandon, and then the unusual, pleasant sensations she ha8 experienced with Steele Denegal.
“Granny, do you have to know someone for a long time to know if he’s the right one?”
“Sakes no, child! Even without bundlin’, I picked out Jonathan right off.”
Granny rose slowly and touched Lilah’s shoulder.
“Time I was puttin’ these old bones to bed. You coming?”
“In a while, Granny.”
For a long time after her grandmother left the room, Lilah stared out the window toward Fortune’s Fancy. Now that she knew the whole story, the mansion mocked her with its elegant beauty. It seemed to her that Simon Patrick had planned it that way—to remind the Fitzpatricks every day of their lives that he had stolen their birthright and subordinated their family even to the slaves of Rainbow Hammock.
She thought of Elizabeth Patrick’s rude dismissal of her the evening before. Of course she didn’t want Lilah in her home. Lilah was a threat! Brandon might be out of her reach now, but there was still Jeremy—unattached and just the right age. Lilah might easily reclaim what belonged to her family by marrying him.
Then Granny’s words came back to her: “A lucky woman marries for love.”
She thought again of Steele Denegal. He had been kind, attentive, and strangely exciting. But was that love? It seemed a good part of it from what Granny had said.
She had thought Brandon Patrick had made her understand the meaning of the word. But, perhaps, there was more to it than she’d realized.
Which did she want? To avenge her family name or to live forever with a man she could truly hold dear—someone who would return her feelings in kind?
The unanswered questions worried her mind as she settled in bed and dropped off into dreams filled with masked faces and swirling emotions. But one face took center stage in her night drama—the ruggedly handsome countenance of Steele Denegal. And the feeling that pervaded her earlier in the evening grew wanner and more intense as she slept.
Rainbow Hammock Page 5