“I can't decide which of you is prettier,” Elijah said to the two women. He scratched his chin as though pondering one of the great mysteries of the universe.
Both Rose and Elizabeth blushed at the compliment. Simon felt a reflexive flash of jealousy, but ignored it. He knew he had no rival for Elizabeth's affections, but Elijah would bear watching.
James cleared his throat and forced a smile. He gestured to a set of whicker chairs and a settee. “Why don't you two rest for a few minutes? Elijah and I have some business to attend to,” he added with a pointed look at his brother. “But, it shouldn't take long and, if you'd like, I'm happy to give you a tour of the plantation. If that would be of interest.”
“Very much,” Simon said. “Thank you.”
James and Eli excused themselves, and Simon waited for Rose and Elizabeth to take seats before sitting down next to his wife.
“You have to forgive, Eli,” Rose said. “He's harmless. I think he does it just to provoke my husband. Brothers, you understand. When the rest of them are here, it's a miracle the house doesn't fall down around us.”
“How many Harper brothers are there?” Elizabeth asked.
“Two others surviving, although they live so far away now we don’t see them very often. There were six boys when I was a girl. Of course, the Lord has seen fit to take a few to Him since then. All three Harper sisters have been lost to us.”
“Nine children?” Elizabeth said. And five of them dead now, Simon thought.
“Yes,” Rose said. “I also come from a large family. Seven brothers and three sisters. They're all in Charleston and Richmond and spread all over. I do miss them, dearly.” She looked down at her hands folded neatly in her lap. “I always wanted a large family myself, but some things are just not meant to be.”
The melancholy in her voice was palpable.
Both Simon and Elizabeth were only children. It was difficult to imagine growing up in a household with so many siblings, although, large families were much more commonplace in this time period. A woman could easily give birth every year or year and a half for ten or twenty years.
“I hope we'll get a chance to meet Louisa later,” Elizabeth said.
Just the mention of the girl's name and Rose shed her grief. “Yes, of course.”
~~~
As promised, James and Elijah returned to join them about twenty minutes later. Simon could still feel the tension between the two men; perhaps it never abated. Rose had a minor crisis with the house staff that had to be taken care of and begged off and the rest made their way around the back of the house and through one of the gardens.
“River Run is just under 2000 acres right now. We have one hundred field hands and can produce nearly 1000 bales of cotton per season. Although, I hope to do better,” James said as he gave them the overview of the plantation. He was particularly proud of his slave-to-bale ratio and overall crop value when it came time to market.
Simon was about to ask a question, when he felt Elizabeth squeeze his arm. He looked down and she nodded toward a patch in the garden with the same blue flowers they'd seen at Mary's grave. Without knowing more about the scarcity of the flower, it was hardly conclusive evidence. For all he knew, those flowers could be in every garden in Natchez.
“Of course,” James continued. “We have other holdings. My brothers grow rice in Yemassee, South Carolina and sugar over in the Ascension Parish. But my heart is here in River Run.”
They had emerged from the garden and into a clearing with multiple outbuildings, including, Simon realized, a massive stable.
James spoke to one of the grooms, who hurried inside. He turned to Simon and Elizabeth. “I assume you both ride.”
“Have you met a Texan who can't?” Elizabeth said with a smile.
What on earth was she thinking? There was reckless and then there was Elizabeth. Why did she always seem to go out of her way to find dangerous situations to explore? Simon shot her a sharp look that she studiously ignored.
“Very good.” James said.
He glanced at Simon who nodded, reluctantly. “Something gentle for my wife, please. Her skills are not as sharp as her wit.” He ignored the face she gave him.
Elijah and James walked into the stables leaving Simon and Elizabeth alone.
Simon leaned down and said in a tense whisper. “Exactly when did you learn how to ride?”
Elizabeth shrugged diffidently, but Simon knew she was putting on an act. “I've ridden,” she said. “Some.”
Maybe the heat had finally gotten to her?
“My father and I used to practically live at the race track,” Elizabeth said too casually. “The trainers used to let me ride the horses all the time.”
Simon narrowed his eyes. “A small girl on a racehorse?”
“Okay, so they led the horse around the paddock, but technically I was riding.” She patted his arm in an attempt to soothe him.
Simon snorted.
James and Eli came out of the stables discussing the health of one of the horses. It seemed James' horse was nursing a sore leg and wasn't ready to be ridden yet. Two grooms led several horses out behind them.
“If you think I'm going to be left behind, you can forget it,” Elizabeth whispered. “And I rode a pony at the fair once, too,” Elizabeth added with arched brow as she started toward them.
“In a dress?”
She stumbled a bit and glared over her shoulder before continuing on. Simon would have laughed if it weren't her neck on the line.
James had chosen a handsome chestnut for Simon and a large broad-backed strawberry roan for Elizabeth. The groom led Elizabeth's horse to a mounting block. Simon saw her swallow hard as she looked at the two horned, off-center sidesaddle.
Simon came up behind and whispered in her ear. “Put your right leg over the top pommel and the ball of your left foot in the stirrup. Keep your hips square to the horse; don't lean to the left.”
“Right. The chalice from the palace has the brew that is true.”
“Elizabeth.”
She lifted her skirts and climbed up the stairs. Thankfully, the old roan was as still and as calm as could be. Elizabeth mounted and managed, barely, not to slide off the other side.
“Easy peasy,” she said with a shuddering wiggle in her seat.
Simon patted the horse's neck. “Let him do the work. At least he knows what he's doing. And for God's sake, be careful.”
Finally, she seemed to hear the genuine distress in his voice and nodded reassuringly.
Not reassured, but with little choice, Simon mounted his horse as James and Elijah did. It wasn't until then that Simon noticed Elijah's black mare. It had a broad white blaze down the center of its face. Remarkably like the one on the horse they'd seen the man riding that night in the cemetery. Of course, like the flowers, a white blaze was hardly unique. Simon hadn’t been able to get a close enough look to be sure it was the same one. Separately, each clue was hardly incriminating, but together…
Simon looked to Elizabeth to see if she'd noticed, but she was distracted by Elijah turning circles around her.
“This way,” James said and led their little procession from the stable and paddock area. Behind the long buildings was an expansive vegetable garden.
They passed through a courtyard complex where separate buildings housed the kitchen, which was separated from the main house for fear of fire, the smokehouse, chicken house, store house, dairy, laundry and a large cistern with water reserves. Beyond them were several barns and holding pens.
“This is our ice house,” James said proudly, nodding toward a single-story brick building with a pitched roof. “All brick, even the pit. Took months to finish, but it provides far better insulation against our Southern summers. Ours is one of the largest in Mississippi, I understand.”
It was constantly surprising how primitive some things were in this time. It was such a little thing in modern life, but with no refrigeration, Southerners had to import blocks of ice from the No
rth and store them in large underground ice houses. Only the wealthy could afford such a luxury as ice in the summer.
“Have you ever had a real mint julep?” Eli asked Elizabeth as he rode beside her. “Don't answer that, because you haven't until you've had one of mine. I'll make you one later that'll put tears in your eyes.”
Elizabeth laughed, delighted. Simon gripped his reins more tightly and reminded himself that they were there to help someone, not to murder someone.
They left the house yards and passed the cotton gin house where the seeds were pulled out of the cotton lint. It was a corkscrew-like contraption with a shingled roof and a box at the bottom. Two long, wooden beams angled down from the top toward the ground.
“What's that?” Elizabeth asked.
“Our cotton press,” James said. “We hitch mules to the buzzard wings and it turns the screw, pressing the cotton down into bales. We hope to have another by next fall.”
They turned onto a long dirt road. One side was pastureland and the other held a row of small, identical buildings.
“Our slave quarters,” James said. “We take pride in taking care of our people.”
Simon hardly considered the hovels he saw before him as anything he would consider taking care of someone. He supposed there were far worse slave quarters to be seen elsewhere though. At least these appeared to be well-maintained, for what they were.
Each house was roughly fifteen-feet square with thatched roofs and a single chimney. Fences separated small pigpens and gardens between them. A group of thirty or more slaves stood in a line in front of an open tent just ahead. Each slave took off his hat and bowed his head respectfully as their party passed.
“We provide clothing twice a year and our doctor,” James said nodding toward the end of the tent, “Dr. Walker, comes once a month to make sure they're all fit and healthy. A sick slave can lead to twenty before you know it and half your crop rots in the field.”
Simon grunted in agreement and swallowed the bile in his throat. It was hard to accept. To look at these men and women, and, God help them, children, and know their fate and be helpless to do anything was more difficult than he ever could have imagined. If he hadn't known better, it would be easy to look at them as poor workers, hardly different in any age, except for one glaring detail. They lacked one essential right — freedom.
“Excuse me for a moment,” James said. “Dr. Walker!” He steered his horse over to the front of the tent.
A large man came out of the tent wiping his hands on a dirty towel that he casually tossed, without even looking, toward one of the slaves that stood nearby. His hair and beard were streaked with grey and Simon guessed his age at late-forties, perhaps fifty. His crisp white shirtsleeves were rolled up to the elbow. He carried himself with an assurance that crossed well over the border into cocksure. A single glance over his shoulder at the slaves waiting their turn had them nervously and quickly averting their eyes. It was abundantly clear that they feared him. If it was possible to dislike a man before meeting him, this was the one.
“James,” he said, in a deep melodious voice, as he reached up to shake Harper's hand.
“I hope you'll be staying for dinner,” James said.
“You know I can't turn down Missy's crackling bread. Or your good bourbon.” He patted a hand over his stomach.
“Good. We'll see you back at the house then,” James said and with a tip of his hat rejoined them on the dirt road.
The doctor called out sharply for the next slave who shuffled reluctantly into the tent.
They left the road and cut across the property. Although cotton was River Run's cash crop, there were hundreds of acres set aside for fodder crops for the livestock - hay, barley, corn and wheat. Other fields were earmarked for cultivating vegetables such as sweet potatoes, pumpkins, peas and collard greens. Other than the farm equipment, items for the big house and the slaves' clothing, about which James made a point of detailing the great effort and cost he took to import from Boston, the entire plantation was self-sufficient.
“All of this and the fields back behind that copse of trees,” James said as they stopped alongside an enormous field with row after row of upturned soil, “will be cotton in the fall. All except that swamp over there. Nothing grows in the swamp.”
Simon could see it in his mind's eye. The tall brown stalks with tufts of white as far as the eye could see. Dozens of field hands doing the backbreaking work of hand-picking each boll.
“Our land is perfectly suited to its aim,” James said, shifting in his saddle. “We are out-producing most of our neighbors by ten percent. There's a tract of land just up river that would allow us to expand our operation and increase that divide. With more slaves and some hard work, we could be a 2000 bale plantation by next year. Of course, ready capital is always in short supply.”
So that was it, Simon thought. At first, he'd simply thought James was proud to show him around their plantation, but Simon knew a pitch when he heard one. He glanced over to Elizabeth who was being distracted and entertained by Elijah. Perhaps that had been part of the plan all along. Eli would occupy Elizabeth leaving James free to woo Simon and his money.
“Two thousand,” Simon mused aloud, baiting his own hook, “and the price per pound?”
“14 cents. That'll rise this year, I'm sure. And with an average of 500 pounds per bale…”
Simon did some quick math. “At 15 cents for 2000 bales, that's…$150,000.”
James looked off at the distance. “Mm-hmm. All there for the taking.” He turned his horse around. “Should we start back?”
This was a fortuitous change of events, Simon thought. In an instant, he'd gone from burdensome guest to potential investor. Now, James' rush of hospitality made more sense and it gave Simon leverage in the relationship he'd sorely needed. One could only push their host so far, but a wealthy, would-be partner could demand much more. Invitations, access, and information suddenly became much easier to acquire. Simon allowed himself a small smile.
They stopped to water their horses at a small, clear stream that fed a shady pond hidden back in the woods off the main road. It was late afternoon by the time they returned to the house. Simon dismounted and walked over to Elizabeth who was busy trying to figure out how to get down.
Simon held up his arms. “Just make sure your dress doesn't snag.” He caught her as she slid down the saddle with an audible “oof”.
She'd done well, but he could see from the pained look on her face that it had come at a cost. “They don't call it a charley horse for nothing,” Simon said.
“Very funny. I'm going to need a long bath and an even longer massage if I'm ever going to be human again.”
Simon leaned down and whispered, “I can't promise you the bath, but the massage…”
Elizabeth smiled and made a thrumming sound that made Simon's pulse race. Maybe he could find that bathtub after all? Did they make tubs for two in 1850?
“Did you find out anything interesting from James? All Eli wanted to talk about were his racehorses and how beautiful I am.”
“Poor butterfly.”
Elizabeth shrugged and tried to look pious. “I struggled through.”
Simon chuckled. “I didn't find out anything interesting about Mary, but I think we've found our 'in' to local society.”
Elizabeth arched an eyebrow, but didn't ask any questions as James came over to them. “Shall we go back to the house?”
When they walked up the back steps to the house Rose met them. “I was wondering when you all would come back. Did James take you all the way to kingdom come? You must be exhausted,” she said to Elizabeth. “Come upstairs for a rest. I'll have some lemonade sent up.” She turned to Simon, offering him a knowing smile. “I'm sure you men have plenty to talk about.”
Chapter Eight
Elizabeth felt silly having a stranger help her take her dress off, but considering how hot and tired she was, she probably would have let Jack the Ripper do it if it meant a lit
tle freedom from her clothes. The housemaid helped her out of her dress and then, mercifully, loosened her corset just enough. She closed the heavy drapes and left a tray with cool lemonade on it, finally shutting the door to the upstairs bedroom behind her and leaving Elizabeth alone in the quiet.
She drank down a glass and looked around the room. Like everything else at River Run, it was beautiful with pale blue walls and a large four-poster bed. There was also a long chaise, called a fainting couch, and now she knew why. Between the heat, her layers of clothes and the corset, she was ready to plotz.
She sat down on the couch and lay back. The room was still and quiet and the heat still pressed down on her. It was only moments before she drifted off to sleep.
~~~
The doctor had finished his work and joined the men on the back porch for a drink and a smoke while the ladies rested. Eli and James continued to prod each other. There was genuine brotherly affection there, but also a genuine animosity. The doctor, knowing which side buttered his bread, sided with James on almost every point, although his interest in the subjects was minimal at best. His focus stayed on the drink in one hand and the cigar in the other.
“I understand,” James said to Simon, “you are a baron of some sort.”
“A baronet.”
“Should we call you Sir?” the doctor asked with more than a twinge of sarcasm.
“No,” Simon said. “When I took an American wife, I took the country as well. I don't see the need for an artifice such as a title.” He glanced over at the doctor. “A man commands respect by who he is and not what someone calls him, Doctor.” Simon saw the flint in the doctor's eyes and turned his attention back to the brothers. “I appreciate that in America a man is who he makes himself to be for good or for bad.”
Eli raised his glass in salute.
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