“Usual.”
“Where’s Bettina?”
“Down in the root cellar, looking for those peaches we put up this summer. She’s determined to make peach cobbler. She says if she does, winter will finally release his icy grip.”
“Serena, if you look outside, I think we’re due for another handshake.”
Serena walked to the paned-glass windows. “Oh, dear. March is cruel.”
“Is,” Catherine agreed. “Mother’s snowdrops are peeking up and it looks like more snow coming. It has to end sooner or later.”
“Later.” Serena shrugged.
Catherine smiled, hung up her coat, walked down the polished hall to her father’s office.
“My dear.” He pushed his spectacles up on his nose. “The day will come when I will be buried under papers, an avalanche of papers. People will ask you, ‘How did Ewing die?’ and you will tell them, ‘He suffocated under papers, poor soul.’ ”
“Oh, throw them on the floor.”
“Tempting.” He held up one offending document. “Massachusetts has printed more money, devaluing what they owe me and everyone else. You know, I ask myself why do business in my country? It’s becoming impossible to make a profit. Indeed, it is the reverse. There is no order.”
“Well, we will just have to do business with England and France.”
“Yes.” He paused, took his spectacles off. “But how can a nation survive if commerce, trade is not promoted? I want to do business with my countrymen. For one thing, sending tobacco, hemp, anything across the Atlantic is expensive and risky. You never know.”
“There’s a reason people say, ‘When my ship comes in.’ ”
“There is.” He rummaged around and handed her a letter executed in a strong hand. “From Baron de Stael.”
Years ago when Ewing visited that Continent, a journey expected of educated young men, he met the baron, a few years younger than himself. The two got along and corresponded over the years. Ewing thought the fellow possessed some sense.
Catherine read, paraphrasing, “Calonnet can’t control the treasury deficit.” She named the French minister of finance, a man of self-importance. “Payments to the Army are delayed, our highways are falling to bits. We must have reform. I give the comptroller general credit, he knows it but I fear for our future. Finance is the base of all stability.”
She looked at her father. “The French appear not to be better off than we are.”
“One can have the greatest army and navy in the world. One can conquer other countries, but if you can’t administer them, if you can’t promote trade among nations, encourage your own people, you will fail. I leave the French to themselves. They excel at crisis, then escaping from same, but I don’t know as we can do that. We are too new. I wonder will we be strangled in our cradle by our own stubbornness? And you are right. We must concentrate our efforts on England. If there’s one thing an Englishman understands it’s money.” He put the paper back in the pile.
“You’d think we’d all figure that out.”
“Catherine, never underestimate human greed or the need to control. Yes, you would think that every state would realize we can’t compete against one another. We don’t. Is it possible violence will erupt? Have we defeated the British to war against one another?” He flopped back in his chair. “I’m being gloomy. Sorry.”
“It’s a gloomy day.” She leaned over his desk to tidy his papers. “Father, if we stick to tobacco, timber, and apples we should sail through these troubled waters.”
“If we trade across the ocean. I don’t see how I can do business with other states now and expect fair recompense.”
“Maureen Selisse seems to be doing all right.”
A silence followed this, he stacked his papers together. “She does, doesn’t she?”
“The foundry helps.”
“Yes, but the foundry can’t be making enough money to cover her lavish expenditures. A copy of our carriage is just one of them.”
“Her jewelry is fabulous, she has bedecked Jeffrey in the finest clothing possible, she has sold some horses, then turned around and brought all that furniture from France. I quite like it. Usually I don’t.”
“Hmm, the black with the ormolu. It is beautiful but one desk would buy a three-hundred-acre farm in the shadow of the mountains. I wonder how much Francisco really left her and even more, how long can it hold out?”
“Sheba, according to Bettina and our girls, has been bragging about how Maureen will send her down to Martinique and from there to Paris. She declares she’s on a business mission for Maureen.”
“That’s absurd. No one would send a slave, a woman no less, to conduct business.”
“Perhaps not, Father, but think of the ships that sail into those ports. Filled with wine, furniture, fabrics, expensive everything, and some of these places are duty free. The jewelry alone would produce punishing fees if brought into, say, Charleston.”
“Yes, it would. Francisco must have taught her how to outrun the taxman.”
“Her father was rich and she married rich,” Catherine mentioned. “She’s shrewd.”
“Shrewd or not, no one can spend money like that without sooner or later facing the bills.”
“Maybe she trades. I don’t know, but I would like to know and I would like to know the source of Sheba’s power.”
“Ah, yes.” He exhaled, then changed the subject. “They never found the slave who ran away, Mignon. Poor little thing. I expect she froze to death.”
“I don’t know, but Maureen and Sheba are certainly vengeful when it comes to their people. Broadsheets put up throughout the state, advertisement for reward in Philadelphia’s paper. For someone who accused a woman of stealing jewelry I haven’t noticed the vacancy of one bauble with the exception of her pearl necklace. I can’t imagine that little bird stealing pearls.”
He smiled. “What is it about other people’s money that’s fascinating? For instance, I have heard that our former governor, Mr. Jefferson, spends money like water. Patrick Henry appears to have more sense, but the man is littering the state with his illegitimate offspring.”
Catherine laughed. “Let us give him credit for energy.”
“No discretion. Ah, well, foolish men.” He threw up his hands. “One should try to conform to one’s wedding vows. It was never a problem for me but then no woman could compare to your mother.”
“I think some men are just restless. I don’t know.”
“I expect sooner or later Jeffrey Holloway will become restless.” He said this without censure. “Then again, he’d better be careful. He is as owned as one of her slaves.”
“Do you think love is a form of slavery, Father?”
“Of course not.” He answered swiftly. “Untrammeled passions are, but true love is freedom.”
“I think so, too.”
“Back to business. You have a good hand, help me write letters to our agent in each state. Perhaps they have a sense of what is going to happen regarding currencies, tariffs. Forewarned is forearmed.”
“Indeed it is, Father. But Caesar didn’t listen.”
He paused a moment. “The Ides of March. A damned unlucky day.”
November 9, 2016 Wednesday
“You can tell the difference.” Harry pointed to the large paned-glass windows.
“There’s nothing we can do about it really.” Tazio Chappars, the architect heading the Save the Old Schools committee, sighed. “Who can blow a paned-glass window today? And if they can, he or she will charge us a fortune.”
“Got that right.” Liz Potter, tired from a long day, slumped into a desk, the chair, wooden, not too horribly comfortable.
Tazio, half African American, half Italian, and all beautiful, headed this group to save the one-hundred-and-forty-six-year-old buildings.
Hester shrewdly realized a woman of color needed to run the show. Liz Potter, African American, came on board after Hester’s death. Harry and Ned rounded out the steering commi
ttee. Panto Noyes offered his legal services gratis. Ned, with tremendous effort years back, managed to browbeat the county into preserving the schools, designating them for preservation. He could not, however, woo the county officials nor anyone in the House of Delegates to release funds to further shore up the structures. Ned could and did work both sides of the aisle, but preserving school buildings used by the children of slaves and then their children and on down the line lacked the high-voltage appeal of something that could get a delegate’s face in front of the cameras. Politics had become theater, bad theater. With the presidential election yesterday everyone was sick to death of campaigning, mudslinging, et cetera. Ned knew he couldn’t try for state funding for at least another year.
The four started a campaign to raise money when Hester died. They raised enough to repair any leaks in the roofs, to install heat pumps, not cheap. The nascent budget was wiped out, but they could again use the wells, the waterlines wouldn’t freeze, they’d replaced the old pump.
In the center of the two actual schoolroom buildings reposed a potbellied stove, big and shorn of any aesthetic delights. Despite the Spartan design those potbellied stoves worked as well as the day they were put smack in the middle of each room, the pipes straight up and out the roof.
Ned, first into the high school building, filled the stove up with seasoned oak, kindling underneath. By the time the three ladies showed up, the room was warm and fragrant. The thermostat for the heat pump stayed at fifty degrees to save money.
The four met in the high school building. The primary school was exactly the same, but for whatever reason they met in this one, the floorboards worn shiny from thousands of feet over the decades.
The teacher’s desk, a large wooden rectangle, commanded the room from a raised dais. Mrs. Murphy, Pewter, Tucker, and Brinkley sat and listened.
“Ned, any hope that a new president will energize causes such as ours?” Liz asked her delegate.
“If only.” He smiled ruefully.
“How many more fund-raisers can Albemarle County endure?” Liz threw up her hands. “There isn’t a week that goes by that I don’t receive a ball invitation or someone coming through my door asking for an item for a silent auction. We can’t compete and we are out of cash.”
Tazio, pencil and pad in front of her, scribbled some figures. “Our monthly electric bill, in winter, should hover at about four hundred dollars.”
“Four hundred dollars!” Harry’s jaw dropped. “That’s too much. We just put in three new heat pumps, supposedly state-of-the-art.”
“They are, Harry, but these buildings aren’t insulated and the windows aren’t double paned. We lose a lot of heat,” Tazio explained.
“We could insulate,” Liz tentatively suggested.
“We could and we should. It wouldn’t change the appearance.” Tazio had thought this through. “But we have to buy the rolls, not terribly expensive. It’s the labor that will kill us.”
“We could try to take a page from the Savannah School of Art and Design.” Liz brightened. “Students with professional supervision have rebuilt about sixteen hundred homes in old Savannah with the city’s cooperation. Why can’t we do that here? Use shop classes from the high school.”
Ned sat up straight. “Worth a try. Let me approach the city council first and then the county commissioners. One of our confusing difficulties is the city and the county are different political entities. But I’ll see.”
“Ned, that’s wonderful.” Tazio loved the idea. “And we get young people preserving their history.”
“Then what?” Harry’s eyebrows raised.
“What do you mean?” Liz asked.
“She’s got her problem look,” Pewter remarked.
“What do we do with the buildings? I know Hester thought of a museum, but museums aren’t always a big draw. When you think about it, who will come out here to Crozet to walk through an African American and Indian school?”
“You know, she has a point,” Tazio agreed.
“Why can’t we use the primary school building for those grades and this one for high school?” Liz held up her hand. “Of course, the county will never agree to these being used as an actual school, but what if they were used for history classes? We’ve talked about this, but really, what if each school in the county and the city had a schedule where they would use these buildings for a day or even a week? They would have to carry in wood for the stove, no computers so they would have to do their lessons the old way. Maybe they would even have to memorize things like, you know, like Lady Macbeth’s speech or Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address or maybe Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream.’ They go back in time and they would have to bring their lunches just like the children did then.”
The other three thought about this, then Harry said, “They’d sure learn. It’s a wonderful idea.”
“We will have a lot of work to do before presenting this, but it’s worth a try.” Ned smiled. “I like the idea of living history. Maybe we could think of something useful for the storage building, too. It’s just as lovely as the two classrooms and now it’s got heat. Water’s there. Well, we don’t have to come up with anything right now.”
“A stable or a barn. The kids can take care of some cattle, chickens, I mean if we’re going to do this let them live as our ancestors lived.” Harry was firm about this.
“Come on, pull on your coats, let’s look at the storage building.” Harry walked over to her jacket and scarf hanging on a peg by the door.
The four trekked outside, past the primary school building. Tazio unlocked the storage building. The temperature hung inside right at about fifty degrees. The wind came up outside so they stepped in gratefully. Tazio switched on the old overhead lights.
Tucker, who had dashed in with Brinkley, stopped to sniff as did the Lab. “I smell old cologne.”
Brinkley inhaled deeply. “Me, too.”
The two cats prowled around but, except for some stored desks, nothing else was there. Well, three rolled-up garden hoses.
“Tidy.” Harry smiled.
“I check it maybe once a month. You remember all the junk that was in here.”
“Broken light fixtures, old wash basins which we rehabbed. Leaves, lots of leaves. Clean now but kind of forlorn. However, it could be useful.” She paused. “I think we were too shocked to think because of the Tahoe.”
Ned’s eyebrows raised. “You aren’t considering a garage.”
“No, no, but it just hit me. Whoever parked that Tahoe in here knew it was empty, knew our meeting schedule.” Harry’s voice rose.
“A lot of people know about these buildings. We’ve had a few fund-raisers in the past,” Ned countered.
“How are you coming along with rolling back the Pletcher law?”
“Many of our citizens still can’t meet the requirements, so they don’t receive benefits. No scholarship money, no anything really. I don’t know if the Pletcher law can ever be untangled. We may have gone as far as we can, but that doesn’t mean I can’t keep trying. A living history experiment here might be a small help. You never know. Right now, my biggest fight is against Dominion Power and the pipeline. That’s been my primary focus, as you know, but anytime something comes up in the House, I try to attend to it.”
Harry complimented him. “Big job.”
As the humans talked politics, the animals investigated every inch of the storage building.
“This could be a nice kennel,” Tucker suggested. “The children could bring their dogs to school.”
“What about cats?” Mrs. Murphy asked.
“Cats aren’t obedient. You’d disrupt classes,” Tucker said.
“Well, you’d beg for food. They’d pull out their lunch pails and you and Brinkley would be awful.” Pewter sniffed.
“So would you,” Tucker fired back.
“Only for tuna fish sandwiches,” the gray cat disingenuously replied.
“What about roast beef?” Brinkley smiled.
; “Well—” Pewter’s eyes brightened.
“I’d like peanut butter,” Mrs. Murphy added.
“Murphy, peanut butter isn’t as good as roast beef.” Pewter sat near a vent blowing out heat, set at fifty degrees.
The tiger cat held firm. “Is to me.”
“I bet if all else failed they could rent these buildings. The two classrooms would make really nice small houses. Not exactly bungalows but nice, the windows make these buildings pretty, light,” Tucker remarked.
Brinkley, who had worked closely with Tazio, wagged her tail slightly. “Would, and my mother could turn all this into something special. She’s the best, but it’s politics. The county would have a fit. I hear the conversations, plus sometimes she reads me her emails. People don’t make things easy. There’s always someone who protests. She’s so patient.”
“Well, someone has been in here,” Tucker said, “who wasn’t patient.”
“Tazio keeps the door locked,” Brinkley informed her.
“Easy to pick a lock if you know how. Or maybe someone has a key.” Tucker shrugged. “Well, it can’t be that important and the place is clean. No one has been destructive.”
“Think whoever parked the Tahoe wore that faded cologne?” Brinkley wondered.
“Probably,” Tucker answered. “It’s fainter now than when we first detected it.”
Mrs. Murphy mentioned what they all knew. “It’s a pity they can’t catch a whiff and it’s a pity they can’t know what we tell them.”
March 18, 1786 Saturday
“A pepper pot.” Ewing laughed. “Why our government sent both Jefferson and Adams to France together, well…” He shrugged.
Yancy Grant laughed with him. “Perhaps they will balance out each other, but Franklin overshadows everyone so I hear. Then again, our neighbor is most junior to Franklin and Adams. I doubt that is congenial.”
“No.” Ewing thought a moment. “You, Sir, have lived in France. Should you not put yourself forward?”
Smiling broadly at the compliment, Yancy grimaced slightly. “Ah, Ewing, you know I am no politician. Even Jeffrey Holloway outmaneuvered me.”
A Hiss Before Dying Page 17