“They’re talking about me…I know them!” she muttered angrily. For a short time she watched, then had to move, to do something. David’s analysis—”She has no resources”—had been highly accurate. Ellen had never been a reader. If she had loved books as her daughter, Rena, did, she might have been able to use them to fight off the terrible boredom that crushed her. Nor did she sew or quilt or do any of the fine needlework that most Southern women took pride in. She had no interest in the plantation, either. Gracefield was a source of income to her, a place where she could go when she got tired of Richmond society. But she knew nothing about the operation of the place—and could not have cared less that this was the case.
This, then, was the root of the problem: Ellen Rocklin had nothing to do. If Susanna had been put in the wheelchair, she would have run Gracefield from it. She would have been busy with her family, her home, her Bible, her church—being confined to a wheelchair would have been an irritation, but no more than that. But Ellen was basically an empty woman who had filled that emptiness with the wrong things—men and alcohol—and now that those fillers were no longer available, the days became a torment. She roamed the house and the grounds, restless as a caged animal, ready to strike at anyone who came close to her.
Turning from the window, she shoved herself across the room and pulled open a drawer in the cherry dresser. The drawer was stuffed with papers and mementos, which she yanked out, scattering them over the floor. Rummaging through the drawer, she found a single piece of gray paper with a few words scrawled in a rough hand: Will meet you Wednesday in the arbor at midnight. Don’t have nobody with you!!
There was no signature, and Ellen stared at it fixedly, then tore the paper to shreds and tossed the fragments into the drawer. Wheeling around, she left the room and, passing one of the maids, snapped waspishly, “Bessie! Go clean up my room! It looks like a pigsty!”
She spent the day moving over the grounds on the brick paths, going to the kitchen to complain about the food. Dinner passed, then supper, and the house grew quiet as the family went to bed about nine o’clock. Ellen’s nerves grew tighter as she waited impatiently for midnight. At eleven thirty she left her room, moving across the pine floor slowly. The family bedrooms were all upstairs, so there was little danger of waking anyone. However, sometimes the house servants were on the lower floor. Of course, they usually were in bed by now.
That seemed to be the case, for Ellen saw no one as she carefully opened the kitchen door and wheeled herself outside. She left the house and wheeled herself as quietly as possible toward the scuppernong arbor. The wheels of her chair clattered on the brick, and once she stopped, holding her breath, thinking that she had heard something. But as she listened, the only sounds around her were the chirping of crickets and the hoarse cry of a bullfrog from the pond.
Though the arbor was next to the house, no one could see inside the thick covering of vines, nor could they hear a conversation. It was for this reason that she had sent a message to Clyde Donner to meet her at this spot. She pulled inside the arbor, stopped, and waited.
Thoughts ran through her mind, sometimes flashing and sharp, sometimes random and without logical pattern. She was aware that she was not thinking in normal patterns and, in rare moments of lucidity, feared she was losing her mind. But this was not a lucid moment. Rather, as she sat in the warm darkness, she thought of Melora Yancy—and hatred washed over her like a red tide. There had been a time when she had believed Clay and Melora had done nothing wrong, but lately a fixation had come to her.… She’d been having dreams in which Clay left her and went to the younger woman.
Of course, Ellen no longer felt any love for her husband—if, indeed, she ever had. She had known when they were married that young Clay was in love with Melanie Benton, who was now married to Gideon, Clay’s cousin. Ellen knew Clay had married her only because she had tricked him into it, yet she laid the blame for the unhappiness of her marriage at Melanie’s feet. The years had passed, and Clay had long since resolved his feelings for Melanie…but now there was Melora. And when Ellen thought back to the past, the acid of old memories bringing aching bitterness, she often could not distinguish between Melanie’s face and Melora’s. In her mind, they had become one. And all of her hatred was focused on that mixed image of the two women she believed wanted to steal her husband from her.
Ellen shivered. She knew time had become vague and indistinct to her, that she often wandered in her mind between the past and the present—and it frightened her greatly. Sometimes she wept in terror, tears running down her cheeks, and wondered how she had come to such a terrible fate. Now, though, as she sat there in the darkness, there were no tears, for the thought of Clay and Melora filled her poor twisted soul, leaving room for nothing but a cold fury.
The sound of a horse coming down the road startled her from her bitter thoughts. The animal stopped, and there was a long silence; then she heard faint footfalls and a hoarse whisper. “Anybody here?”
“Come into the arbor, Clyde,” Ellen whispered urgently. A sense of exultation came to her. He was here! Now she could do it! “Don’t worry; everybody’s in bed. Come closer so I can see you.”
She peered at the short, stubby figure of the man who advanced. He wore a black hat low on his forehead, but the moonlight was bright enough for her to recognize him. Donner was a gambler who was not good at his trade and so had turned to robbery—and worse—to offset his losses. He had a lantern jaw and a pair of smallish blue eyes. Ellen had known him for a long time—for a brief time they had even been lovers—then Donner had been sent to jail for theft. This was the first she had seen him since he had gotten out of prison.
A crafty man, Donner looked around, alert as any animal. “Don’t like to come like this, Ellen,” he said. “What you want?” He holstered a revolver he’d been holding at the ready and came closer. “You must be hard up to send for me!”
Ellen had always been able to handle Donner by playing on his addiction to lust, but that was before her accident. Now she knew her only tool was money. She narrowed her eyes and spoke softly. “Clyde, I want somebody hurt—bad.”
Donner’s pale eyes glinted with a sly expression. “That mean you want ’em dead?”
“Yes!” Ellen almost choked on the word, then forced herself to smile. “You’re a sharp fellow. I always said that.”
“No, you always said I wasn’t very bright,” Donner answered. “Who you want shot? Your husband?”
Ellen’s head snapped back. “Clay? Of course not!”
Donner shrugged, his mouth holding a slack smile. “When a woman loses her man, she usually wants him killed.”
“Who says I’ve lost him?” Ellen’s eyes glinted with a wild expression, and she grasped the arms of her chair, her back arching in a vain effort to rise.
“Well, you ain’t no good to him no more, are you? Man wants a good, strong woman, not a cripple.”
Blinding lights seemed to go off inside Ellen’s head, and a sharp metallic taste came to her mouth. What went through her mind were not thoughts—they were not orderly enough for that—but waves of hatred so strong they seemed to scald the inside of her skull. But for all that, she still retained enough craftiness not to lash out at Donner. He was her only hope of getting at Melora, and she would take no chances on alienating him. She waited until the storm inside her head subsided, then said, “That’s none of your business, Clyde. Clay’s a man, and men are weak. No, I want you to kill the woman who’s trying to take him from me.”
“Sure, the Yancy woman.” Donner grinned when he saw Ellen flinch, then shrugged his heavy shoulders. “No secret ’bout that, I reckon. Especially as you told it all over Richmond ’fore you got shot.”
Ellen closed her lips firmly for a moment, then took a deep breath. “All right, it’s her. I’ll give you two hundred dollars to kill her.”
“Two hundred dollars?” Donner gave her an insulted look, then turned to go. When she called out to him, he stopped and faced her i
mpatiently. “In the first place, I ain’t killin’ no woman. I got my standards, Ellen, and unless I got to do it, I ain’t shootin’ no female! And in the second place, even if I was to do the job, it’d cost a lot more than two hundred dollars!”
“I’ll give you more!” Ellen whispered. “Five hundred!”
“You ain’t got five hundred,” Donner snapped. “This place is having a hard time like all the other cotton plantations. They’re all mortgaged to the hilt. You couldn’t raise five hundred dollars hard money to save your life! And Rocklin ain’t lettin’you handle no money, is he, now?” Donner sneered at the woman, enjoying himself. Watching her squirm was little enough revenge for the many times she had taunted and humiliated him—and for the way she’d refused to see him after he got out of prison.
He grinned at her, sharklike in the pale moonlight. “Look, honey, you had your good times; now let that husband of yours have his! So long!” And then he was gone, having disappeared into the darkness.
Ellen sat there, struck dumb with the rebuff. For a long time she stayed in the arbor, her mind rolling with images that flashed and seemed to go on endlessly. Finally she lifted her head and blinked several times. “I don’t need you, Clyde! I don’t need anybody!” she whispered.
Her journey back into the house was uneventful, but instead of turning to go to her room, she turned the opposite direction. The double doors that led into the study gave her a problem, but she managed to open them. Moonlight fell through the tall windows on the east of the room, and she slowly rolled to the huge rolltop desk where Thomas Rocklin did his work. Carefully she opened a lower drawer, reached down, and pulled out the pistol that lay inside. She put the gun in her lap, fingering it almost lovingly, then closed the drawer and left the room.
When she was safely inside her bedroom, she moved to turn up the lamp on the table, then examined the weapon. It was not a large gun—much smaller than the .44 that Clay kept. Thomas had bought it for use against prowlers and had tried to teach Susanna to use it, but to no avail. “I’ll trust the good Lord and not a pistol!” Susanna had said firmly.
Ellen knew little about guns, but she could see that the chambers in the cylinder were loaded. She pulled the hammer back and spun the cylinder as she had seen Thomas do, then put both hands on the handle and aimed the gun at a picture of Jefferson Davis on the wall. She squeezed the trigger very slightly, felt it move, and released it at once.
A strange smile came to her lips, and she rolled her chair to the dresser. The right drawer, which she kept locked, was stuffed with old letters. Once when she had raged at the servants, accusing them of spying on her and picking at her things, David had installed the lock himself, removing it from an old chest in the attic. She carefully unlocked the drawer, moved the letters to the front, then put the gun down and covered it with the letters. Locking the drawer, she moved to the table and picked up a piece of paper and a goose-quill pen. Dipping the pen into the inkwell, she began to write slowly:
Miss Yancy,
You will be shocked to receive this letter from me, I’m sure. We have not been friends, of course. In fact, I must confess that I have hated you for years. Undoubtedly you have heard of my misfortune. I am confined to a wheelchair, and will be for the rest of my life. When one is in this condition, there is a lot of time to think, and I have been thinking about my husband a great deal.
He assures me that there is nothing more than friendship between you two. I have found that hard to believe, but I would like to trust Clay. He is all I have left now, and if I could really know that he is faithful, I could bear my infirmity much better.
I need to hear the truth from you. My mind is not clear on many things, but you are, from what others tell me, an honest woman. If I could only talk to you, I’m sure I could look into your eyes and see the truth! It would mean so much to me.
I do not think it would be wise for you to come to Gracefield. And I can’t come to your house. I am able, however, to drive a buggy. I have no right to ask this, and you will probably refuse, but if I drove out toward your place some afternoon, could you give me just a few minutes? I am sending this letter by a trusted slave, one who will tell nothing. If you would see me, give him the message, and I will be on the old plank road by the deserted sawmill at dusk tomorrow. You know the spot. It is close to Gracefield and far from your home, I am afraid, but I cannot make long journeys. Just tell the slave that the answer is yes if you will come, and please burn this letter!
Please come!
Ellen Rocklin
When she had signed her name, she sprinkled fine sand over the letter, sifted it, then dropped the sand into a wastebasket. She put the letter into an envelope, heated a small cylinder of red wax, and carefully sealed the flap. Then she sat back in her chair, trembling.
It was done.
She went to bed, managing the transfer from chair to bed with difficulty, then waited for sleep. I’ll give Highboy ten dollars to take the letter, and I’ll tell him he’ll be sold down the river if he ever tells anyone about it.
The sun looked weak and tired as it dropped over the top of the hill, pale and obscure from its labor of heating the earth—or so it seemed to Melora as she rode along the abandoned plank road. She had thought of little else but Ellen Rocklin’s letter since receiving it. She had been startled when a tall black man had stepped out from behind a tree as she was on her way to the hog pen.
“Miz Rocklin, she said give you dis and not let nobody see me,” he had said.
Melora had read the letter quickly and knew that she had no choice. “Tell Mrs. Rocklin the answer is yes,” she said. The tall slave had nodded, then disappeared at once into the woods.
Over and over Melora had read the letter but had said nothing to her father. Today, acting as casual as she could manage, she had said, “I’m going to the store, Pa. I’ll be a little late coming back, so don’t worry.”
Buford was accustomed to Melora’s wanderings and said only, “Bring back some blackstrap, daughter. We ate the last yesterday.”
Dressed in men’s overalls so that she could ride astride, Melora had made it a point to go to Hardee’s Store and pick up some blackstrap. Then she had headed north. Now as her mare trotted toward the spot Ellen had named, Melora thought of the strangeness of what she was doing. In the last few months, she and Rena had grown close. The young girl had often shared facts about her mother with Melora, and she well knew that Ellen was not only physically infirm but failing in her mind.
She’s a pitiful thing, Melora thought as she turned off the main road. For the rest of the journey, she tried to think of some way to speak to Ellen so that her innocence—and Clay’s—would be evident.
The old plank road had once been used for passage to a sawmill, but the mill had been abandoned for years, so only hunters and fishermen used it any longer. The surrounding terrain was rough, broken by deep little valleys and sharply rising ridges. The road snaked around the high places, skirting abrupt drop-offs, and as Melora rounded a sharp bend, she saw in the fading light a woman seated in a small buggy. The rig was on a narrow road—so narrow that there was only room enough for the buggy. To the left was the steep wall of a bluff. To the right, a sharp drop-off. It would take careful driving to thread the dangerous spot.
As Melora rode up, she was greeted at once.
“So you did come!” A smile appeared on Ellen’s lips.
“I told your slave I’d be here.” Melora slipped off the horse and dropped the reins. The horse was trained to stand and made no move as Melora went to stand beneath Ellen.
“I’m glad you asked me to come, Mrs. Rocklin,” Melora said quietly. “I’ve wanted to talk to you for a long time.”
“And I’ve wanted to see you, too.” Ellen’s smile appeared to be fixed on her lips. She had slept not at all since receiving Melora’s reply, and now she had a headache, fierce and raging—the kind that often came when her mind grew too active. “Did you tell anyone you were coming to meet me?”
<
br /> “No. I didn’t think it was necessary.”
“Ah, good! Well now, tell me about you and Clay.” The pain in Ellen’s head came sharply, causing her eyes to blink, but her pleasure at finding the woman before her made her endure it. “Tell me there’s nothing between you!”
“We have been good friends for many years,” Melora began, trying to speak as clearly as she could. She was troubled by the expression on Ellen’s face, the fixed smile and the wide-staring eyes with the bright glitter. However, she spoke clearly and without hurry. She felt a great pity for Ellen, knowing that the woman had nothing to sustain her in her great trial. She thought of Rena and Clay and prayed that somehow her words would be able to persuade Ellen that she had nothing to be jealous about.
Finally, when she had spoken as well as she could, she concluded, “Your husband is an honorable man, Mrs. Rocklin. Even if I wanted to take him, he’d never leave you.”
Ellen had listened, saying nothing. Now she nodded and whispered, “You’re very beautiful, Melanie.… You always were.”
Startled, Melora looked at the woman. “I’m Melora, Mrs. Rocklin.”
And then Ellen laughed, a wild, crazy laugh that seemed to resound around them.
She’s insane! Melora thought with a jolt.
“Oh, you don’t need to lie, Melanie,” Ellen said with a nod. And then she lifted the revolver, which she’d been holding on her lap. She smiled at the look of shock on the young woman’s face. “I’ve wanted to kill you for years,” she said almost pleasantly. “Ever since you took Clay away from me.”
Melora knew she was in terrible danger but allowed no fear to show in her face. “Mrs. Rocklin, you’re not well. Put the gun down.… I’ll take you home.”
Appomattox Saga Omnibus 2: Three Books In One (Appomatox Saga) Page 27