by Beth White
Rattling the paper in her hand, Selah cleared her throat.
Joelle looked up, blinking. “Oh, hello, Sissy, I didn’t hear you come in. Did you say something?”
“No, because I knew it would be pointless until I had your full attention. I hope I’m not interrupting some world-changing composition.”
“I daresay not, though one can always hope.” Joelle shut her journal and put her feet on the floor. “What did you want?”
“I should tell you to go and wash the ink off your nose, but that too would be pointless, as it would reappear in less than five minutes.” Smiling as her sister absently rubbed her nose, creating an even wider purple swath, Selah pulled a chair out from the table and sat down. “Where are ThomasAnne and Wyatt?”
Joelle waved a hand in the vague direction of the kitchen yard. “I think they went to the barn to see the new goat twins. Or feed the peacocks. Or something—”
“Never mind. I wanted to talk to you alone anyway. We just had a visitor.”
“Really? Who?” Joelle yawned. She clearly couldn’t have cared less if the First Lady had come to call.
“Remember the man who saved my life in the train wreck?”
“I don’t believe you mentioned him.”
“Maybe I didn’t.” Selah frowned, trying to think back through what she’d told Joelle in the aftermath of her trip to Memphis. “Anyway, there was a man who helped me escape from the car before it fell into the ravine.”
“He just came here? And you didn’t introduce me to him?”
That sounded terrible. But she’d just been so taken off guard by Levi’s sudden appearance. “Says the queen of the absent mind. His name is Levi Riggins, and he’s a Yankee carpetbagger of sorts.”
“Is he now?” Sitting up, Joelle tucked her notebook behind her back. “What was he doing here?”
“Well, while we were in Oxford, I revealed to Mr. Riggins some of our difficulties—with Grandmama and our creditors, you know—and he offered to help. I didn’t take him seriously, of course, but apparently he meant it, because he came to present a rather harebrained idea for recovering our fortunes.”
Joelle possessed quite a good mind for absorbing and synthesizing information when she chose to focus it. Her expression went from surprise to curiosity to amused incredulity over the space of a moment. “Selah Daughtry, you have, against all odds, acquired a beau.”
“I have not!”
“How old is this Mr. Riggins?”
“I’ve no idea.” Selah pictured the hard, clear hazel eyes, the creased cheek, the military horseman’s carriage. “Perhaps thirty.”
Joelle rolled her eyes. “And what was his ‘harebrained idea’?”
“It seems he had somehow become acquainted with Schuyler Beaumont.”
“Somehow? What does that mean?”
Selah had not considered the implications of that chance meeting. Now that she thought about it, perhaps it was not so coincidental after all. “I had told Mr. Riggins that we stood to lose our property to creditors and that I planned to meet with a banker in hopes of securing a loan. I also informed him that the railroad wanted to buy us out at an unrealistic price—though I did not mention Schuyler by name.”
“Selah! It’s not like you to divulge such personal details to a stranger.”
Selah sheepishly put a hand to her forehead. “I think I must have been more shaken by the accident than I wanted to admit. Anyway, Mr. Riggins says he and Schuyler happened to be staying at the same hotel in Oxford and were paired for dinner. My name came up in the conversation, Riggins put two and two together, and he seems to have talked Schuyler around to offering a sort of partnership, rather than an outright buyout—”
“Wait. What was Schuyler doing in Oxford, anyway?”
“I don’t know.” Selah shrugged. There seemed to be an embarrassing lot she had taken for granted.
“And Riggins has convinced you this partnership is a good idea? I don’t like it.” Joelle’s gaze was razor sharp now. “What if Schuyler was there to visit the bank ahead of you—to make sure you didn’t get that loan, so that you’d be forced into accepting his offer?”
Selah gasped. “He wouldn’t dare!”
“He absolutely would, that despicable rake! Remember the bath house incident?”
Selah studied her sister’s tight expression. She had a reason to distrust Schuyler, but childhood pranks didn’t necessarily lead to adult villainy. “Jo, don’t let’s reject it out of hand. We need to think this through. Mr. Riggins had some good points in favor of the arrangement.” She proffered the paper Levi had left on the desk. “We would lease the big house and its surrounding hundred acres to Beaumont Enterprises for ten years, on a renewable basis. We could stay in our home—in fact, eventually move back into our old rooms in the big house—and wouldn’t it be good to see Ithaca come back into its own? We would have gainful employment, me as manager, ThomasAnne in charge of the kitchen, and you with—with, well, whatever you wish.”
“Correspondence,” Joelle said promptly, scanning the paper in her hand. “That’s what I’m good at.”
“Exactly!” Selah grinned at her sister. “Anything word-related would be your responsibility.”
“And we could bring Aurora home?”
“We could . . .” Selah wasn’t so sure of the wisdom of that move. Aurora had become a bit of an unknown quantity since taking up residence with their grandmother all those years ago.
“Are you going to tell ThomasAnne?”
“Not right away. I don’t want to deceive her, but neither do I wish to unnecessarily worry her. You know how she frets over change.”
Joelle nodded. “Then we pray about it, just the two of us, until we’re sure. I’m still not convinced we can trust Schuyler at his word, not to mention Mr. Riggins, a man we don’t know at all. How long do we have before we’d need to give an answer?”
“Mr. Riggins mentioned a few days.” Selah strode to the window, twitched the curtain aside, and pressed her nose close to the glass to stare at the big house. “I wonder what Papa would make of it.”
“He wouldn’t like it. But he’s gone, Selah. We have to do what’s best for us.” Despite her dreamy nature, Joelle had a practical streak that seemed to surface when Selah most needed it.
Selah turned. “Do you remember how it came about that we went to boarding school in Holly Springs?”
Joelle shook her head. “I just know how much I missed Mama, how homesick I was.”
Selah remembered her sister slipping into bed with her at night, crying in her arms, for weeks. “It’s my fault we went.”
“What do you mean?”
“I wasn’t a boy.”
Joelle laughed. “That’s the kind of thing that isn’t exactly under one’s control.”
It wasn’t funny. “True. But Papa wanted—needed—a son. I knew it in my bones. I followed him around the plantation, watching everything he did, wishing I could . . .” She caught Joelle’s gaze. “One day—I suppose I was nine or so—I snuck into the office and opened the account book he’d left on the desk. To my surprise, it made sense to me. But I found a mistake, where he’d transposed a figure. I found a piece of paper and copied everything, making the correction.”
Joelle’s eyes were wide. “What happened when he found it?”
“Well, at first he went roaring around, wanting to know who’d been trespassing in his office.” That had been a terrifying sight, but when no one confessed and Papa had offered to punish one of the slaves, Selah had taken her courage in both hands and admitted she’d written the correction. “When he realized I’d fixed his error, he laughed. And said I was better than a boatload of knuckle-headed boys.” Papa’s bear hug that day was one of her warmest memories.
“What did that have to do with us going to boarding school?”
Selah sighed. “Papa insisted that he wasn’t going to let such a fine mind go to waste, and he started looking for the best girls’ school in the South. He w
anted to send us to Mobile, but Mama pitched a fit, so he settled for Holly Springs.”
Joelle’s expression was unreadable. “I was barely seven when we left home.”
Selah stared at her sister for a moment, then burst out, “But think how our lives would have been shaped so differently if we’d grown up here, sequestered in the big house, waited on by slaves like princesses in a castle. Yes, I got the maths and sciences I craved at school, but, Jo—we were allowed to read! We were taught to write, to think, to develop arguments.” Her favorite teacher, Miss Lindquist, had settled for nothing less than Selah’s best.
Joelle nodded slowly, gaze inward. “And the music.”
“Yes! Papa would never have bought that piano if you hadn’t learned to play in Holly Springs. He was so proud of you.”
“He was proud of you too.”
“Until I got us expelled and Miss Lindquist terminated.”
Joelle uttered a short bark of laughter. “Even then, Papa was secretly pleased that you wouldn’t back down.”
“Mama was mortified. An abolitionist in the family.”
“Two of us,” Joelle said quietly. “I just wasn’t as articulate as you.”
A pensive silence ensued. Selah broke it with another sigh. “It was a good thing for us to go away, but nearly impossible to fit in here with eyes open and mouth shut. And not be able to do anything about it.”
“I loved Mama and Papa so much. How could they have been so wrong?”
Selah shook her head. “Everyone around propped them up in their beliefs. When everyone knows something is true, you don’t question it. ‘Everyone knows Negroes don’t have feelings like we do. Everyone knows Negroes are happier here than in Africa.’ Which doesn’t make any sense. If they don’t have feelings, how can they be happier?” She flung her hands wide. “Like you said, what’s done is done, we can’t change the past. And the fact is, it’s going to take a lot of money and elbow grease to repair the damage Uncle Frederick did when Papa left for Tennessee.”
When Selah returned from school, Papa had begun teaching her how to log crops, sales, and purchases, and she could have run the plantation in her sleep. But Uncle Frederick could not be convinced that a young woman—be she ever so possessed of a scandalous amount of expensive education—should be allowed any responsibility for such a massive holding as Ithaca.
Selah had been forced to watch in growing frustration as profits dribbled away under her uncle’s stewardship—slaves sold, valuable breeding livestock dying of disease or butchered for food. Vegetable gardens and cotton fields growing up in weeds that fed the local wildlife but did little for the struggling family. Two years into the war, Uncle Frederick himself had wasted away to a bitter shell of a man, then finally succumbed to scarlet fever.
The assault on the big house by those Union renegades, followed by Mama’s subsequent death, had left the girls with little prospect of attracting suitors who might have rescued them from their dismal circumstances. Selah and Joelle had moved to Memphis for the duration of the war. Compounding their misery, at the end of the war federal agents had threatened to confiscate the property under reconstruction laws, and the legal battle had ensued.
“You’re right. Like I said, we’d best make a covenant to pray.” Joelle crossed one hand over the other. “Clear eyes, pure hearts.”
Selah matched the gesture and laced her fingers with her sister’s. Their family watchword had brought them all through more than one crisis. But it was based on prayer and faith in the One whose holiness provided that purity of heart.
She bowed her head. “Dear Father, Joelle and I need you right now . . .”
Ten
March 2, 1870
Ithaca Plantation
As dusk fell, the light of an oil lantern bobbed in the woods about half a mile east of the Tupelo train depot. The terrain seemed not to bother the man carrying the lantern; he trudged along, quite familiar with the area.
Truth be told, Daughtry knew this land as well as he’d known his prison cell at Camp Douglas. His limping pace was sober, contemplative. During the day, he’d hidden out in a rotten shelter left by Union soldiers after the Battles of Tupelo and Old Town Creek. He’d even found an old rifle, not too rusty, and some ammunition that might prove useful—both practically and as a reminder of the seriousness of his purpose.
He’d been hunting this land since he was a young man, two years married and a new father, determined to make his mark on the world. And he had done that. He had taken his father’s gift and turned it into a property of mythic proportions, with that house the glowing central jewel in the crown.
The idea that the railroad—the Beaumonts—could come in and take it away rubbed him raw, much like the bone spur that distorted his gait. Fresh pain was useful, anyone could tell you that. A man must feel in order to be alive. Rage had kept him alive in prison, had facilitated his escape, had brought him back from exile. Now it would enable him to destroy the destroyers on his land.
He’d batted the railroad away once, a long time ago. It appeared he’d have to do it again.
Scully had served his main purpose of obtaining information. Armed with knowledge of exactly where the new rail line would be going through, the fact that his girls were eager to keep their inheritance, Daughtry could accomplish the second prong of his mission. Maybe he couldn’t come out in the open, but he could make sure Ithaca never slipped into enemy hands. No one but the legitimate owner would protect this land. His father had entrusted him with it.
It was his inheritance. His legacy.
Eleven
March 4, 1870
Tupelo
Rubbing his aching upper arm, Levi paused outside the hotel—which turned out to be much less comfortable than the Thompson House in Oxford. He’d shared a room with a drunken salesman who’d snored half the night and sold shoes in his sleep the other half. Clearly there was a need for upscale lodging in the area.
The sky was overcast, heavy with the portent of something cold and wet—echoing yesterday’s dismal failure to uncover further information regarding Ithaca and the Daughtry family or the Beaumonts’ push to increase their influence in the rail industry. He’d spent two days hanging about at the three saloons in town, pretending to drink with inebriated and loose-tongued patrons, to no avail. Southerners, even under the influence of alcohol, tended to protect their own. The “Daughtry girls,” as they were known hereabouts, and their father “the Colonel” were virtually untouchable.
His gaze fell on the sign beside the front door of an establishment across the street: DR. BENJAMIN KIDD, MD. It was one of only a handful of businesses he hadn’t approached.
Why not talk to the doctor? He had nothing to lose except time.
The man who answered his knock looked like none of the stodgy physicians of Levi’s previous acquaintance. Perhaps in his late thirties, Kidd exuded extreme eccentricity, pale blue eyes blinking in childlike innocence behind rimless spectacles, wheat-colored hair rumpled. His clothing seemed to have been randomly chosen in the dark.
The doctor looked irritated. “Yes? Can I help you?”
“Dr. Kidd?” Levi extended a hand. “My name is Riggins, and I’d like you to take a look at my arm, if you have time.”
Kidd looked over his shoulder with a grimace, then slowly shook hands. “I suppose I can give you a few minutes. Come on in.” He walked over to close an interior door, then gestured for Levi to sit upon an examining table on one side of the room. “What’s the trouble?” he asked, his focus suddenly, sharply on Levi’s face.
Ah. Now here was the scientist Levi had been looking for, the carnival-barker’s attire notwithstanding.
Levi sat on the table, removing his heavy outer coat. The room was warm from the heat of a small potbelly stove squatting in the far corner of the room. “I’ve a piece of a bullet in my upper arm.”
“Let me see.” As Levi took off his dress coat, the doctor added, “How long has it been there?”
Levi unbu
ttoned his waistcoat. “Nearly six years. Since Brice’s Crossroads.”
Kidd gave him a sardonic look. “Union, aren’t you? You’ve got nerve coming back here.”
“The war’s over. You going to refuse to treat me?” Levi stripped off his shirt.
“I advise you not to make assumptions.” The doctor took hold of Levi’s arm. “Does it hurt now?”
“Some.” The injury only hurt on cold, raw days like today, and he’d come to accept the pain as part of life. He endured Kidd’s examination of the ruined, scarred flesh of his shoulder without flinching.
“This was infected,” the doctor muttered, pressing his thumb against the center of the scar.
Levi nearly came off the table as pain seared him unawares. “Yes,” he managed. “I wouldn’t let them amputate.”
Kidd suddenly grinned and released him. “I don’t blame you. Blasted army sawbones. I suppose they gave up looking for the bullet.”
Levi nodded. “Said I was losing too much blood, they needed to sew me up or amputate. I said sew away, then left the hospital and reported back for duty before they could change their minds.”
“If it hasn’t killed you by now, it won’t. I advise leaving it in.”
“But it hurts like the devil on cold days.”
Kidd thrust his hands into the pockets of his trousers and tipped his head. “If I go digging around in your arm, you’ll hurt a lot more and likely die sooner.”
Levi considered him for a moment, then looked around the room. Books towered in piles on every available surface, including the armchair in front of the stove, and papers littered the small table by the window. However, all was free of dust and dirt. Rigid rows of medical implements, lined up on a wheeled cart near the examining table, gleamed with metallic purity. A diploma on the wall behind Levi’s head, from the Medical College of the University of Louisiana, proclaimed that Kidd was a distinguished fellow of surgery and pharmacology.