“Forgive me,” he muttered. “I have no excuse. I wish you had a brother or father to give me the horsewhipping I deserve for handling you like that.”
Her mouth and wrists were bruised but she ached more at his self-contempt. “Please!” she begged. “What I said must seem most ungrateful. I should have spoken with more care.”
“Damn it, no!” He thrust his hands behind him. His voice was husky with self-disgust. “That completes my humiliation, Rachel, that you blame yourself for my aggressiveness! Let me offer some amends by providing you with a home.”
“I can’t impose.”
“You call an imposition what is my joy. Stay, Rachel. I swear I’ll never touch you again unless you wish it, though that’s like saying I’ll never drink again or breathe.”
Why couldn’t she love him? With her old life shattered, with her dread of being preyed upon, wouldn’t the splendor of Gloryoak and his protection be better than anything she could hope for?
Even as she pondered that with some detached part of her mind, she knew he’d expect a virgin. She could not cheat him. And beyond that, in spite of the ecstasy and delight she had known with Etienne, her feelings toward sex now were overlaid with revulsion and dread. Hadn’t Etienne, just before the three broke in on them, manhandled her? Lust could drive even Harry out of his usual kindness. What had been a natural pleasure once, an innocent and healthy flowering, was tainted now by the terror and outrage of being used, of being violated in spirit and body.
Some of this must have shown in her expression, for Harry took her hands and brought them to his face. “Trust me, Rachel.”
But she could comprehend some of the frustration and physical urgency her presence would cause. And he had been so good to her. She wished she were able to give him what he desired. But she also knew, in every fiber of her body, if he raised his mouth from her hands to her lips, if his voice thickened with passion and he brought himself hard and seeking against her, she’d think back to the tearing of her clothes and body and fight like a cornered wild animal.
“I trust you, Mr. Bourne, but it’s not fair for me to remain at Gloryoak when I can’t offer any hope for what you generously offer.”
He laughed, let his long fingers lightly touch her cheek. “While there’s life, there’s hope. You’re very much alive, my dear, though you need time to recover from what you’ve been through.” When she started to object, he assumed the air of assurance typical of a man of his wealth and position. “I was your father’s friend. For the sake of that friendship, stay on at Gloryoak until a suitable alternative develops.”
“You’ll inquire about positions?”
His eyes danced. “Be sure that I’ll be on the watch for back-country planters with huge families to educate or a genteel female academy that doesn’t starve its staff. Meanwhile, you could keep in practice by refreshing my Latin and literature. Chaucer was one of your father’s favorites, as I recall.” He smiled charmingly. “I can promise you’ll find me a most receptive pupil.”
“You’re not just trying to make me feel useful?”
“Rachel, you adorable little puritan! You’ll be useful! But I freely confess these elevating studies will be a way to put you at ease about spending time with me, a good deal of time.” His eyes twinkled so infectiously she had to laugh, and they went to luncheon in such a mood of gay companionship it was easy to forget those frightening seconds when he’d ceased to be her patient friend and protector.
In the days that followed, Harry seemed to have forgotten, too, though they spent most waking hours together. After a breakfast of ham, grits, eggs, beaten biscuit and muffins with marmalade and butter, they rode, usually to one part or another of the plantation. Gloryoak grew mostly cotton, but there were vast forests of magnolia, pine, oak, cypress, black walnut and hickory which Harry allowed to be felled only with careful selection.
“I fear God too much to end the life of a tree that’s been here for hundreds of years,” he told Rachel. “If I had come first, Gloryoak would not be so rich or have so many fields, for I’d never have cleared them. In a way, the ruthlessness of a father can make possible self-righteousness and tender conscience in a son.”
She stroked the neck of Lady, the handsome bay mare he had selected for her as both spirited and sweet-tempered. “You’d have had a tender conscience, Harry, whenever or wherever you were born.” It had become a game of theirs to toss out quotes for the other to identify. “‘He is gentil that doth gentil dedis.’”
“Chaucer?” guessed Harry as they left woodlands for luxuriant fields of sorghum and corn. Gloryoak had its own sorghum mill and sold what its people didn’t use. Except for coffee, tea and spices, virtually all the plantation’s food was grown on its rich black loam. Apart from style of serving and preparation, in fact, there was little difference in the food on the Bourne Meissen and the earthenware of the slave quarters past which Harry and Rachel would shortly be riding. “Since you’ve come, I’ve remembered much your father taught me,” Harry went on. “Without him, I might have had quite different ideas. I had but a glimpse of Virgil,” he continued in Latin. “But ‘Note too that a faithful study of the liberal arts humanizes character and permits it not to be cruel.’”
“Ovid,” smiled Rachel, but grew quiet as she saw small dark children playing around the cabins under the eyes of a few old granny women. “I’m glad you’re letting your people buy their freedom, Harry.”
“I freed my father’s long-time personal servants at his death,” said Harry. “I wish I’d freed them all, but these days, with tempers running high over abolition, the most I dare is to give credits beyond food and clothing till a reasonable sum is reached. Most of my hands stay on and draw wages.”
Rachel contemplated the children. Those more than seven or eight were working, but there must have been a dozen under that age. “If they’re all going to be free, shouldn’t they know how to read and write and do simple arithmetic?” she asked.
Harry threw back his head and laughed. “I might as well be hated for making blacks uppity as for freeing them,” he said. “By all means, give it a try. And I hope it will content you, madam, to thus earn your place at Gloryoak.”
Harry supplied slates, chalk, pencils and foolscap as well as giving Rachel freedom to use books from his library. On a long bottom shelf she had found well-worn children’s books, including texts her father must have taught from; spellers, geographies, grammars, written and mental arithmetics and one dog-eared book each on physiology, rhetoric and orthography. She glanced through and discarded everything but the geography and a history of Egypt.
School began in the grape arbor, where a globe hanging near Rachel’s chair sometimes swayed in the breeze that rustled the trees around them. Eight boys and girls in spotless, well-worn clothes perched on two benches clutching their slates. Glances that were variously curious, sullen, excited or resigned focused on Rachel.
Was this a mad idea? Would a little learning simply make their lives harder, for even if they became free, many people would still consider them a kind of animal, and uneducated whites would particularly resent a black who could read, write and do sums. They wouldn’t be so easy to cheat, for one thing. Rachel seemed to hear her father saying, as he often had, that this was the most common argument against liberty and education, that people were happier without them, but that this nation had been based on the faith that human beings were born equal with certain natural rights. The irony that Jefferson, himself a slaveholder, had framed those lofty words didn’t destroy the hope.
“How many of you know the song about Moses and Pharaoh?” she asked. They all did, for meeting was held every Sunday in the small whitewashed church near the commissary, and the singing was loud and lusty. Rachel smiled at the show of hands. “Let’s all sing it. Then we’re going to find out about the country where Moses grew up.”
When Moses was in Egypt’s land—
Let my people go!
Go tell ole Pharaoh, let my people
go …
They were all swaying by the end of the powerful verses. Rachel’s skin prickled. What a song for slaves to know! How could they sing it without wondering when they were going to be free?
Father had believed it must be soon, especially after John Brown’s attack last October on Harper’s Ferry in Virginia. He’d been hanged in December for treason and criminal conspiracy. Father considered him deranged because of the terrorism he’d fostered in bloodily divided Kansas, but insanity was rampant in national and state legislatures, with South Carolina and Mississippi already voting appropriations for military forces.
“Let my people go …”
With the song reverberating on the soft, blossom-scented air, Rachel turned to the globe. “The Bible tells about the rivers of Eden. One of them, the Euphrates, flows into the Persian Gulf here, but it once passed the great city of Ur, where Abraham lived.”
“Father Abraham?” called a little girl whose many pigtails were adorned with yellow ribbons.
“Father Abraham,” said Rachel. “Now, you know he traveled to the land of Canaan, which is right over here along the Mediterranean. And you know his grandson Jacob had a beloved son Joseph who was sold into Egypt by his jealous brothers. Joseph became a friend and advisor of Pharaoh and his brothers and their families came to live in Egypt, but after many years there were so many Israelites that the Egyptians were afraid of being outnumbered and decided to control them by making them slaves. They worked on the pyramids, the tombs of kings, and raised other buildings from bricks they made of mud and straw. Tomorrow we can make bricks till we have enough to put together a pyramid. Now let’s think for a while about Egypt. It was a dry desert country, but it was watered by this big long river, the Nile …”
III
The brick-making was done with serious glee, and after rows of one-by-two-inch rectangles were drying in the sun, Rachel drew hieroglyphs of birds, a serpent, a hand, foot and boat, explaining that the Egyptians first drew pictures of things, then developed signs for actions and ideas, and that they had an alphabet of twenty-four consonants.
“They believed writing was a gift of God,” she explained, deciding not to complicate matters with Thoth or the deciphering of the Rosetta Stone, which had so enchanted her father. “And the Israelites believed the alphabet was written with a flaming pen around the crown of God,” Rachel went on. “So you can understand that learning your alphabet is a wonderful thing. What is in books or on paper will not be a secret to you, and you can keep a record of important things.”
Those benefits didn’t seem to impress the youngsters, but they zealously copied hieroglyphs on the bits of mud they had patted out and each scratched his or her own name, which Rachel printed first, at the bottom of the glyph.
Next day, when the bricks were dry, they constructed a pyramid and began to learn to count, add and subtract, by piling on more bricks or taking them away. After a while, Rachel made the alphabet with straight lines and circles and printed the words they wanted to copy on their slates. “School” let out at noon, so she finished by gathering the children about her to admire the illustrations in Aesop’s Fables while she read several of the ancient tales and explained that the stories had been made up or collected long ago by a slave in Greece but could now be enjoyed by people all over the world.
“I still think that was a plumb ign’rant dog who dropped his bone in the water,” said bright-eyed Elijah with a squirm.
“Huh!” snorted his sister Lilia, she of the braids and ribbons, “You a fine one to talk! Always thinkin’ everyone else got more molasses than you or a bigger hunk of pork!”
Harry strolled up, spoke to most of the children by name and admired the pyramid and glyphs. “I always thought myself lucky in my tutor,” he chuckled as he escorted Rachel to the house, carrying her books. “But you’d have made me a scholar, for I’d have studied to exhaustion just to get a smile from you. How in the world did you get those youngsters interested in the pyramids?
“Rivers of Eden,” he mused when she’d finished explaining. “Father Abraham. Moses and Pharaoh and sacred writing. What a lot you have stored in that pretty head of yours along with the wit and sympathy to pass it on to these children!”
“Don’t tease me, Mr. Bourne, or try to make me feel I’m really paying my keep.”
She heard him catch his breath. He caught her arm and swung her about to face him. Since she stood two steps above him she had to look straight into his eyes, green shining with gold. “Pay your keep?” he growled. “Oh, my love, my sweetheart, if you knew—”
“Sir, you promised!”
He bit his lip, glancing away as if the sight of her might undermine his resolve. “I promised,” he said. “But it’s not breaking my word to say that more and more I stand in awe of you. And we play a game of quotes, don’t we? So here is one.” Watching her now, he spoke softly, his tone a caress that sent waves of melting sweetness through her, though she stiffened against this treachery. “‘And these were the dishes wherein to me, hunger-starven for thee, they served up the sun and moon.’”
His mouth was close to hers. He had a clean man’s smell of shaving lotion, soap, leather and tobacco. It would feel so good to be held in strong arms, cradled against him. But—but that wouldn’t be all he’d want and need. She couldn’t, must not, take comfort in his strength and warmth when she wouldn’t give him what naturally followed.
“I—I don’t know that one,” she said, turning.
“Augustine’s Confessions. He tasted all the joys and sins and then became a saint.” Harry mocked her gently. “Do you wish to be a saint first, Rachel, before you know what you’re renouncing?”
What would he think if he knew Etienne had been her lover? “I shall never be a saint,” she tossed over her shoulder. “Are you pleased with those turning plows you bought from Mr. Kelly?”
It developed that he was, and that was their topic through luncheon, that and the way Jefferson was flourishing from the steamboat trade.
The days went smoothly with little variation except for Sundays, when there was no work or school. Harry had offered to drive Rachel to church but she declined, nor would she accompany him when he went to town on business.
She still dreamed about riding with Etienne’s body before her and being treated so callously by the sheriff.
One noon she was astounded to enter her airy chamber and find two gowns spread carefully upon the ruffled counterpane, one of yellow dimity, the other white muslin with blue sash and embroidered roses at neck and hem. Rachel had never seen such pretty things, swallowed as she knew she must refuse them. But she couldn’t resist touching them, holding them up before her as she turned to the tall mirror held by laughing bronze nymphs.
The muslin looked especially good with her sun-browned skin and dark hair and eyes. She touched the blue sash yearningly before, with a sigh, she put the dress from her, tidied herself and went to the veranda where, in the shade of the great oak for which the plantation was named, a tempting lunch awaited—ham croquettes, golden corn fritters and huge strawberries in a crystal bowl.
Though Harry rose at once to seat her she didn’t take the chair and instead gazed at him in distressed appeal. “The gowns are beautiful, sir, but you know I can’t take them!”
“I thought you’d agreed I was to be Harry,” he reminded, firmly easing her to the chair and moving it properly forward. “What’s this about gowns? I confess you have me at a loss.”
“You—you didn’t get them?”
“Indeed not, though I approve the gumption of whoever did since you say the gowns are pretty. I’ll admit I’ve wished to see you decked out, but my rueful knowledge of your stiff-neckedness kept me from daring to suggest a small loan.”
“But if you didn’t—oh, it has to be Tante Estelle!”
Harry chewed tranquilly on a bit of croquette. “Quite likely. And you may command me, Rachel dearest but you’ll waste your breath on Tante. If she thinks you need gowns, then gowns you sh
all have.” He hunched his shoulders defensively. “Don’t drag me into it, please.”
Rachel looked at him suspiciously, but he began inquiring about the progress of the school, and she was soon absorbed in telling him that Elijah already knew his alphabet, Carrie could count to a hundred, and all eight students could write their names.
After luncheon, Rachel sought Tante Estelle in her private parlor and asked about the dresses. She got an anxious stare in response.
“Oh my gracious! Don’t you like them, then, Miss Rachel?”
“I love them! But—well, if Mr. Harry gave you the money to buy them, I still can’t take them. And if he didn’t, they’re much too costly to accept as a gift, though however it happened, I can’t tell you how kind you are, how much I appreciate it.”
“Appreciate?” scorned Tante darkly. “Don’t sound much like it! Two perfectly lovely gowns just needing bad to be showed off and pleasure folks, but our young lady. she’s too proud to do that! No matter she worries Master Harry and throws my trouble in my face. None of that matter! She got to be independent and traipse around in worn-out duds that if we had company they’d think Mr. Harry was a miser who grudged you a hunk of bread and sowbelly!”
“Tante!”
“Isn’t that it?” demanded the tiny woman mercilessly, slanting eyes lit for battle. “You studyin’ your pride, not how other folks feel.” She went on grimly, with great satisfaction. “It so happen that nary a penny of either mine or Mr. Harry’s went into those dresses and there’s more where they came from so what you got to say to that?”
“I—I don’t understand.”
“Good! May be hope for you yet if you can admit that,” Tante sniffed. “That material had been fetched, with all the trimmings, to make Miss Eleanor’s summer things the year she died. She was still mighty young and pretty and in between the children, she had an elegant little waist. There’s material for three more everyday dresses and one party gown packed away in the big cedar chest. No use of it staying there another twenty years till it rots.”
A Woman Clothed in Sun Page 4