Death Brings a Shadow

by Rosemary Simpson

  The silence stretched on, interrupted only by the occasional nervous hiccup from behind Maggie Jane’s fingers. Aurora Lee edged closer to where Selena’s photograph lay. When she saw the face clearly enough to know that it was Eleanor’s, she gasped and then turned away to whisper into her sister’s ear.

  “It’s over,” Elijah finally said, speaking to Lawrence. “I don’t suppose there’s any point denying it. Not if they have the journal.” He sat back in his chair as if what must happen next was as ordinary as any conversation at the end of a pleasant day. “I always wondered what became of it. I found keeping a journal to be a boring pastime, but Ethan wrote so much and so often that I teased him about composing a novel to rival those of Mr. Dickens. When we didn’t find it after he died, I assumed he’d had the sense to burn the thing. At least the pages in which he undoubtedly confessed his great and illicit love.

  “Father suspected him of smuggling the girl North, but he denied the charge and nothing could be proved. We put it out that she’d drowned in the swamp. And then Georgia seceded and war was declared.”

  “Did he never doubt on which side he would fight?” Prudence asked before she could stop herself.

  “Whatever else he did, Ethan was a Bennett,” Lawrence said, as if that answered her tactless and insulting question.

  “He wasn’t the first man a woman of color seduced into forgetting who he was,” Elijah said. “I blame her, not him. My brother was as soft toward our people as our father could be harsh. Selena saw a chance to trick him into getting her to freedom and she took it.”

  “When did you know?” Teddy asked.

  “I suspected, the day you brought Eleanor here to Wildacre,” Elijah said. “The resemblance was so strong there couldn’t be any other explanation. But we had to be certain.”

  “Father set me to combing through the plantation record books from right before and after the war,” Lawrence contributed. He seemed to relish telling the tale. “I found mention of sums of money that didn’t seem to buy anything, then bills from a detective, and a letter that came after Ethan’s accident stating that the agency had closed the case and would no longer pursue the investigation requested by Mr. Bennett.”

  “That agency had gone out of existence by the time Eleanor appeared,” Elijah continued, “but the country is full of ex-Pinkertons setting up on their own. The girl was never formally adopted because Philip Dickson simply used his dead child’s birth certificate. Our operative found a woman who worked in the Dickson house during those years. She remembered hearing of the passing of a female child, but then being told there had been a mistake, the baby was alive after all. The servants were told that while the girl had come close enough to dying to catapult the parents into premature mourning, she had survived. The notice of her birth had already appeared in the newspapers. We assume the nanny must have been aware of the substitution, but that she was well paid for her silence.

  “Given what we knew, we couldn’t allow the marriage to take place,” Elijah finished matter-of-factly. “I did my best to talk you out of it.”

  “And then you did an about-face,” Teddy interrupted. “While I was still in New York you wrote that you would welcome Eleanor into the family and that your initial opposition had only been to test my determination. I’ve never been happier than on the day I received that letter. But it was all lies, wasn’t it?”

  Elijah shrugged as if to ask what difference it could possibly make now that the bride-to-be was dead.

  “I don’t know exactly what your plan was, but I’m sure the Dickson wealth played a role in it. You realized that if I married Eleanor I would come into a fortune that could be directed to the restoration of Wildacre and the settling of whatever debts remained unpaid after you sold the island to her father. I don’t doubt you’ve accumulated more obligations. You were never good at managing what few resources we had.”

  “It’s not necessary to be insulting, Teddy,” Elijah reprimanded his son.

  “And you,” Teddy said, turning to Lawrence. “What did you say to her after your note persuaded Eleanor to meet you in the live oaks that night? There’s no point denying it. Your own sister recognized your handwriting.”

  “She was filth, Teddy,” Lawrence snarled.

  “What did you say to her?” With Geoffrey close beside him and Prudence still holding tight to one arm, Teddy refused to be baited. He wanted an answer to his question, and he thought he could put up with anything Lawrence threw his way in order to get it.

  “Only the truth of who and what she was. And that she was bound to be found out. She’d been raised among Yankees, but we have an instinct for things like that down here. I told her exactly what she could expect to happen if she insisted on going through with a so-called marriage. We have laws against that kind of abomination.”

  Geoffrey unobtrusively moved one hand beneath his coat where it rested within inches of the shoulder holster that held his Colt revolver.

  “How could one brother do that to another?” Teddy asked, wrenching himself free from Prudence’s hold.

  “You became too much like a Yankee for your own good,” Lawrence retorted. He emptied his glass, poured more whiskey. “The Bennetts have always been gentlemen. You seem to have forgotten that.”

  “No gentleman worthy of the name forces himself on a woman,” Teddy retorted. “No matter her condition. He has an obligation to deal fairly with those who serve him. Slavery didn’t have to be the cruel institution we made it.”

  “You’re confusing obligation with privilege,” Lawrence insisted. “There is no such thing as obligation toward a chattel. And the privilege of ownership is a sacred trust between God Almighty and those He has elevated to exercise its rights over the lesser creatures He created. Any man of the cloth worth his calling will tell you that.”

  She had stepped into a different world, Prudence realized. She felt as dazed and confounded as though she were trying and failing to fight her way out of a bad dream.

  “I tried to convince Lawrence that we could deal with the situation,” Elijah interrupted. “Reasonably and in a way that would benefit everyone. Unfortunately, you had already made known your intentions to too many people to simply change your mind. That would have invited speculation and possibly scandal.”

  “What did you have in mind, Father?” Teddy’s contempt for the man was obvious and scathing.

  “Simply that we allow the union, Teddy. For a time. I trusted you would come to your senses when we deemed the time was right to tell you the truth about her.”

  “Then what?”

  Once again, Elijah shrugged. Plainly he didn’t feel it necessary to put into words what Eleanor’s fate would have been once her fortune had been secured. A sanatorium for six months, perhaps a year. A lingering, wasting death that would leave her widower free to remarry. No one the wiser and the Bennetts all the richer.

  “But you wouldn’t agree, would you, Lawrence?” Menace was as clear in Teddy’s voice as though he’d suddenly pulled a weapon.

  “I told Father and I told Eleanor exactly what I’m telling you,” Lawrence said, repugnance written across his features. “Only a fool thinks he can hide that kind of obscenity. What if a dark child had been born?”

  “And you couldn’t sell it off the place?” Teddy mocked.

  Aurora Lee and Maggie Jane’s skirts rustled, but neither sister rose to leave the veranda.

  “Eleanor should have cooperated,” Lawrence declared righteously.

  “You counted on that, did you?” Geoffrey asked.

  “Stay out of this,” Lawrence growled.

  “You obviously did not know my Eleanor,” Teddy said.

  “Or her mother,” Prudence whispered, thinking of the immense courage it must have taken for a heavily pregnant Selena to trust herself and her unborn child to the cotton factor who claimed to be able to smuggle her North. How hard she must have struggled against death after the infant was born. How despairing the moment when she realized that th
ere would be no life with Ethan in a place where they and their child could thrive.

  “I sat across the dinner table from her that night at Seapoint,” Lawrence continued, “and the gorge rose in my throat as I watched her pretend to be white. I could not swallow the food on my plate for knowing I was expected to accept, even for a little while, that she was something she wasn’t.”

  “He would not be dissuaded,” Elijah said mournfully, as though he was once more feeling the wealth Eleanor represented slip from between his fingers. “I begged him to be sensible. He called it compromising his principles. In the end, I had to agree that perhaps he was choosing the more honorable course.”

  “I might have allowed her to pass,” Lawrence said reasonably. “But not here. Not as a Bennett.”

  “She was already a Bennett,” Prudence whispered, more and more horrified at every one of Lawrence’s rationales for what he had done.

  “She turned down my offer,” he said as if he had not heard Prudence’s comment. “At first she refused to accept the truth of who she was. She ran from me, deeper into the live oaks. There was a moon that night; I could see her clearly as she passed beneath the trees. I caught up with her, told her again the story of Ethan’s obsession, of how he’d paid Stephen Aycock to steal Selena. I told her that my father remembered Selena, and that he’d immediately recognized her mother’s face in her. Even before we had proof of what we now knew had happened all those years ago.”

  “You should have come to me instead of her,” Teddy agonized. “I would have taken her away. No one would have ever known.”

  “No,” Lawrence said bitterly. “You might think now that’s what you would have done, but I know you, Teddy. You would never have been able to abandon Wildacre. Have you forgotten that you confided your hopes of building a life in Savannah once you’d established yourself on the New York Cotton Exchange? You talked about returning to the island someday for good. She had to disappear. It was the only way.”

  “You let her drown in the swamp. You knew she could never make her way out of it alone.”

  “Unfortunately, your Eleanor was not that cooperative,” Lawrence said brusquely. “She had to be persuaded.”

  Prudence saw again the hand-sized bruises on Eleanor’s shoulders, imagined the terrified shock when her friend realized that the man looming over her would hold her beneath the swamp’s murky water until she drowned. Did she close her eyes as it happened? Did her heart call out to Teddy in those final, searing moments of life?

  “No Southern jury will convict me,” Lawrence said smugly. “No judge will sentence me. I did what had to be done.”

  Teddy stared at his brother in excruciating horror.

  Then he stripped the leather riding glove from his right hand and struck it across Lawrence’s face.

  CHAPTER 29

  The sharp crack of leather against bare skin echoed in the shocked silence.

  “I shall be your second, Lawrence,” Elijah Bennett said, rising slowly to his feet.

  “And I yours, Teddy,” Geoffrey stated firmly.

  The popularity of duels fought in the name of one’s honor after a real or imagined slight had declined markedly after the war. No one quite knew why, but many blamed the bloodbath from which the nation emerged united once more, but badly damaged. Even in the South, where dueling had always found more favor than in the North, life after the slaughter of the battlefields was too precious to waste on a gentleman’s adherence to the exaggerated ritual of the code duello.

  But for Teddy Bennett, who knew the truth of his brother’s statement that no jury would convict him and no judge would sentence him for the killing of a black woman, it was the only way to exact retribution for Eleanor’s death.

  Geoffrey’s swift commitment to act as his second was further proof, if any were needed, that justice would have to be bought at the risk of Teddy’s own life.

  Prudence, stunned at the prospect of formalized violence in place of a court of law, could not believe what had happened. She understood now why Geoffrey had insisted on accompanying Teddy to Wildacre, why he had stayed at his side from the moment they climbed onto the veranda to confront the assembled Bennetts. He had told her once that brutality lay close beneath the polished veneer of Southern plantation life. She hadn’t understood its all-encompassing nature, hadn’t realized that the barbarity of coldly taking a life occurred in the Big House as well as in the quarters.

  “Pistols at ten paces,” Elijah said after conferring briefly with his younger son. “Tomorrow at dawn. Your principal knows the spot.” He spoke directly to Geoffrey as if Teddy were invisible or not standing within arm’s reach. Until the duel played itself out, the duelists would ignore one another’s existence. All communication would be between the seconds.

  Geoffrey knew the intricacies of the code duello as well as Elijah. All four of the men now inextricably bound together in this exquisite dance of death had been raised on it, though perhaps the younger ones had thought of it as a revered relic of the past. Yet the moment Teddy knew that every other avenue was closed to him, it had suddenly come alive again with unarguable logic and irresistible force.

  “Tell Philip and Abigail what’s happened,” Geoffrey urged as he shepherded Prudence toward her horse. “The dueling ground will be somewhere in the live oaks. Even on a plantation as remote as Wildacre, it was always in an isolated spot.” He didn’t have to explain that the women of the family clung to one another as they listened for the sound of measured shots reverberating through the woods.

  “Can’t you talk them out of it?” Prudence begged.

  “We’re obliged to try,” Geoffrey said. “That’s the first duty of a second. But I don’t hold out much hope of success. Teddy is determined and Lawrence has tradition on his side. Neither of them will offer or accept an apology.”

  “You’re not coming back with me to Seapoint?”

  “I’ll stay here with Teddy.”

  “How can they bear to be in the same house when they plan to kill each other in the morning?” Prudence asked. As romantic as the idea of a duel might sound in a novel, she thought the reality of it was pure insanity such as only men mesmerized by costly and elaborately constructed weapons could dream up.

  “There’s a code of behavior to all this,” Geoffrey explained to a mystified Prudence. “Teddy and Lawrence won’t speak to one another; they won’t even allow their eyes to meet. They’ll retire early, each to his own room, and in the morning, they’ll ride separately to the dueling ground.”

  “Philip will want to be a witness,” she predicted.

  “The servants know where the dueling ground is,” Geoffrey said, his mind already drifting toward the young man whose impetuous action had set everything in motion.

  Perhaps not so impetuous, he decided. Teddy might have worked it all out during that mad dash from Seapoint. Perhaps he had always suspected that he would have to kill his brother to avenge Eleanor’s honor. And his own.

  “I’m not going to stay away, either,” Prudence declared. “Just so you know, Geoffrey.”

  “It’s not customary for women to be present,” he told her.

  “Custom be damned!” she said vehemently.

  * * *

  Elijah and Geoffrey met that evening to work out final arrangements.

  “Lawrence has chosen these matched sets of dueling pistols,” Elijah reported, leading Geoffrey toward the library table where the weapons lay nestled in velvet-lined leather cases. “Each of my sons received a set on his twenty-first birthday. Their initials are carved into the stocks.”

  As he was expected to do, Geoffrey lifted each gold-filigreed pistol from its nest and examined it carefully. Checked the long, smooth bore barrel, the firing pin, the action of the trigger, and the size and weight of the lead bullets stored beside the mold that had created them. He fingered the immaculate tools used for cleaning, and nodded in satisfaction when the inspection was completed.

  “They’re French,” Elijah said
.

  “I recognized the style,” Geoffrey told him. “Beautiful.”

  “Unless there is an objection, Lawrence will use one of the pistols bearing his initials, and Teddy will do likewise.”

  “No objection,” Geoffrey said, wondering if the father had ever envisioned his sons squaring off at one another when he commissioned the dueling pieces.

  “The count will be ten paces. Turn and fire at will.”

  “I’ve discussed this with Teddy. He agrees in advance to all of Lawrence’s conditions.”

  “No apology is tendered.”

  “None is expected.”

  “There’s not time to send to Savannah for a surgeon,” Elijah said.

  “It is understood that there will be no delay in order to secure a medical presence.” Teddy had told Geoffrey to acquiesce to whatever Lawrence, the aggrieved party, demanded. But protocol required that the seconds formally announce and accept every condition that would govern the conduct of two gentlemen in conflict with each other. And every time a constraint was stipulated, there was the slightest possible chance that a refusal might lead to the kind of arbitration that satisfied honor without jeopardizing life or limb.

  “One round?” Geoffrey asked. Each participant would fire a single shot at his opponent.

  “Lawrence has no wish to fight à l’outrance,” Elijah confirmed.

  Not to the death, then, although any bullet taken in the center of the body usually proved fatal. Perhaps not on the field of honor, but agonizing hours or days later. Geoffrey did not doubt that both brothers would aim to do the most damage one to the other.

  There would be no deliberate misses in the early gray light of dawn.

  * * *

  “It’s barbaric,” Abigail declared.

  “Teddy is convinced that it’s the only way to obtain justice for Eleanor,” Prudence explained again.