by Simon Rumney
Teaching the teacher
At the conclusion of her unpredictable sessions with Miss Dotty, Julii spent the second half of her days in a far more dignified and respectable fashion.
The photographer's wife Cecilia was the moral opposite of Miss Dotty. She would arrive each afternoon, diligently on time and fully prepared to teach Julii how to read and write. Things usually went smoothly, but sometimes Miss Dotty's influence would find a way to crossover and embarrass Cecilia.
One such day had started with Julii's urgent need to find the words “pussy” and “pussy wrangler” and “cat house” and “virgin” and “coulda” and “lotta” and “rich” in the book called “dictionary”.
Straight-laced Cecilia spent the rest of that lesson red-faced trying to explain things called "slang words" and why Julii's conversation with Miss Dotty could be considered "a little shameful". And, "While Julii should not be ashamed of asking, it was not the kind of conversation a lady should be having in polite society."
The only other problem Cecelia had was working out a curriculum that Julii could work to. She went to great lengths to challenge her pupil, but whatever Cecilia prepared for their afternoon lessons, Julii always got ahead of her within the first half hour. Julii's ability to read and rapidly understand everything she read was only surpassed by the speed with which she did it.
To fill the rest of the time, Cecilia brought more and more books to read and discuss. Even her huge family Bible was pressed into service and, once Julii realized the Holy Bible had been the leather thing 'full of leaves' at Robert's horrible court martial, she saw it as something evil that had to be fully understood.
Grasping the book's importance to the white man became her obsession. Julii read it and re-read it looking for ways to exploit its power. It was as though she sucked meaning, even the most nuanced meaning, from every page.
When she wasn't reading the Bible, she was reading books. Any and every book in town was searched for and read. Her reading became faster and faster without sacrificing understanding, and the resulting shortage of new reading material set off a chain of events that caused the most remarkable things to happen.
Count Anton instructed one of his blockade-running ship's Captain's to fetch books from Europe on his return voyage. Naturally he spoke Italian to his Italian captain, forgetting to specify the language of the books; so the first books to arrive were all printed in Italian.
Berating himself for his own stupidity, Count Anton did what he should have done in the first place and put pressure on his fawning Confederate clients to fix the book shortage. Desperate to please the man whose materiel's kept them in the war, the high ranking officer's sent orders that resulted in cases of books being sent from almost every major city in the Confederacy. Before these books had a chance to arrive, Julii had taught herself to read Italian.
This in itself was extraordinary, but it was the way she did it that proved truly remarkable. One of the Italian books brought back from Rome by the ship's captain was an Italian translation of an English book. The book was written by a man called Charles Dickens, and his book A Tale of Two Cities had already been read by Julii in its original English.
Julii had immediately understood that if she read both books simultaneously, she would teach herself another language. She did it in just one week in front of her astonished teacher's very eyes.
Another remarkable thing happened as the result of a French Bible arriving at the bottom of one of the many packing cases full of books sent from a place called Montgomery. Using the same method of comparing two books, Julii employed the English bible to teach herself French.
After this strange, remarkable and surprising affair with the Dickens novel and the Bible, Cecilia approached Count Anton to tell him that she no longer thought it fair to accept his money because Julii was now teaching her new and interesting languages.
Count Anton understood her position, but would not even take the chance of breaking one of his beloved Julii's most treasured routines. He insisted on paying her in full every week without fail. It was during these continued session that another remarkable thing happened.
As Julii read about the places in books like the one by Charles Dickens, she began to experience memories. ‘No, they were not memories exactly, rather the same distant yet familiar feelings provoked by the lion amulet.’
One morning during her breakfast conversation, Julii happened to mention the unusual feelings of familiarity she had for the counties called England and France in A Tale of Two Cities. Count Anton's initial reaction was to say, "Something the French call ‘déjà vu' perhaps?"
Julii spent the next five minutes quizzing Count Anton about the origin and the language and the meaning of “déjà vu”. When she had completely extracted everything he knew about that tiny French expression, Julii said: "Exactly."
Julii then went on to say, "I have more of these déjà vu memories. Sometimes I dream of crossing a great ocean on a ship with Robert, sometimes I stand on top of a high wall, and sometimes I see a place made of white stones."
Before finishing his usually massive breakfast, Count Anton stopped eating and politely asked Samantha and Tilly to "Please leave, and do not return until called for."
Empty dishes and cups and saucers were rapidly collected up, heaped on trays, and taken to the kitchen. When the door closed behind them, Count Anton looked at Julii and asked: "Your city made of white stones? Does it have tall round things holding up the roofs of high buildings?"
Julii nodded her head 'yes' and said, "There are beautiful curved, rounded lines cut into the white stone that go all the way from the bottom to the top."
After saying the words: "Columns and flutes", Count Anton adopted a serious expression and said, "I think it is time for me to tell you what I know about your lion amulet and your connection with my family in Rome."
Count Anton looked Julii directly in the eye as he said, "My grandfather could never have met you, but he did believe you would exist."
Pointing to Julii's amulet-covered birthmark, he added, "He also believed you hold significance for our family."
Count Anton paused for a moment and asked thoughtfully, "Excuse me, Julii. I want to make myself perfectly understood. Do you understand words like, ‘significance’?"
Julii's reply held a hint of the cheeky humor she had learned from Miss Dotty. "Would you like the 'significance' of the word explained in English, French or Italian?"
Count Anton smiled. "Of course. My grandfather said you would be very clever, just like him."
Julii had heard Count Anton refer to “he” a number of times before but never “him”. 'Was “he” and “him” the same man?' She remembered his words clearly in the kitchen room of the tall hotel building and during their carriage ride on the day they met. Count Anton had said: "He was right. You are very intelligent."
There was no way around it. She may appear stupid and shatter his illusions but, mustering all of her courage, she had to ask: "When you say 'him' are you are also referring to your grandfather?"
Count Anton shook his head 'no' as he said, "Let me try to explain."
Count Anton refilled Julii's cup with very hot tea before going on. "Let me start by saying a ship sank in Rome's great ocean, now called the Mediterranean Sea, in the year 1815. The man I refer to as 'him', my grandfather's close friend, was on that ship."
After a moment's thought, Count Anton changed his mind. "No, not merely a friend, a man connected to my grandfather by something more profound and powerful than friendship was on board that ship. He is the one I referred to as 'him', and I do not believe it is a mere coincidence that his friend's name was also Robert."
The next thing Julii noticed was the lack of steam rising from her teacup. One moment there had been lots of steam, then there was none.
Touching her cold teacup, Julii was embarrassed to realize that her mind had left the room at the very moment the name Robert was mentioned. She knew that Count Anton had continued s
peaking during her mental absence. Each time he said words like "Rome", or "Waterloo", or "Napoleon", or "the Duke of Wellington", or "The Marsic wars at the time of the Roman Republic”, or "General Gaius Marius", or “General Sulla", Julii's mind was sent wandering in a new direction. She found herself reliving vivid memories of being in these places and being with these people.
Count Anton seemed not to notice Julii's mental escape because at the end of his long account, he simply paused and said, "So? What do you say? Will you come with me and find out if any of this is possible?"
Julii did not know where he wanted to take her, but she trusted him completely. Staring back at the man to whom she owed everything, she said: "Of course."
Count Anton smiled and said, "Good. Because of that shipwreck my grandfather went to his grave ignorant and disappointed. I do not want the same fate for myself.
Julii heard herself say, "I died in that shipwreck, didn't I?"
Business
Max, the man who ran Count Anton's business in Savannah, was not completely incompetent, but Julii knew he was out of his depth within just a few minutes of meeting him.
Even though he considered himself important, his blustering attitude and boasts of meetings with famous people like General Hardee, General Robert E Lee and even President Jefferson Davies seemed to betray his underlying lack of confidence.
Somehow, Julii just seemed to naturally understand his showing off was intended to hide some kind of inner flaw. She could see right through the weakness his bravado was designed to mask as though she had dealt with this kind of 'straw man' somewhere in her past but, of course, that was impossible in this life.
Seeing Max's incompetence so clearly was a major problem for Julii because she genuinely wanted to trust and respect the man who ran Count Anton's business. He was very important to her savior and absolutely no threat to her, but something, which felt impossibly like experience, told her not to.
Count Anton was no fool. Julii could see that he knew the man he employed was not the best. She could see that Count Anton was having to fix his mistakes, but she also understood that most of the able men in the South were fighting Yankees. The smooth-talking man called “Max”, or “Maxim” when anyone important was within earshot, was clearly the best he could do in the circumstances.
Because Max had the good fortune to be born into a rich and well-established slave owning, plantation family, Count Anton used him to open doors. Once through those doors, even the highborn southern aristocracy could tell he was incompetent.
Behind his back, Max was known by all in the office as “the chocolate teapot”. When Julii ask Cecilia to explain the meaning of Max's nickname, the answer made her laugh. "He looks very good and seems perfect for the job, but when you pour in the boiling water he simply melts."
From Maxim's point of view, working for the only really well-organized blockade runner in the South allowed him to “blowhard”, while hiding his sniveling cowardice behind a seemingly legitimate reason not to fight in the front lines like all of the other young men in the South.
Of course there were other blockade-runners, but they were mostly “get rich quick” wailers, grain shippers and coal lugers who had converted their vessels to carry arms from the West Indies to Confederate ports. Many of these blockade-runners were excellent sailors who knew the eastern seaboard extremely well, but unlike Count Anton's brand new fleet of copper-sheathed steam clippers, their wind-powered ships were not the latest technology.
Many of the vessels were old and slowed by waterlogged timbers, which allowed the northern navy's battleships to catch and sink them with great ease. None of these small-time blockade-runners had the need for a back office man like Max, which gave him the unique privilege of being the only General Manager of a blockade runner “exempt” from war service in the Confederacy.
As the war lumbered towards its third year, Max's contribution was being seen by Confederate generals as even more essential. Count Anton's ability to bring materiels all the way from Europe and predictably run the blockade was fast making him the South's greatest asset.
Unfortunately for Max, the office was about to be made incredibly efficient by Julii's inherent organizational genius and, in a devastating twist of fate, those remarkable abilities were about to expose Max's shortcomings.
In an attempt to learn how Count Anton's business functioned, Julii spent her first few days in the office with Max. He was too slow to even see her as a threat, and Julii had no intention of being one. She simply asked searching questions about the business because she truly wanted to help him, but he would always veer off into boastful and annoyingly time-consuming anecdotes.
When she wanted to know something like how the prices of commodities were determined, he would drift completely off-track by saying irrelevant things like, "I remember a meeting to discuss pricing where President Jefferson Davis himself was in attendance."
Listening to his inane nonsense was frustrating for Julii, but she always smiled and listened because she wanted to work closely with Max in order to help the count.
Always waiting silently, Julii listened until he finished speaking and looked to her for some kind of approving response. Because she really wanted to be friendly, Julii would give him an impressed expression, or a fawning word of surprise, or an awe-filled smile.
Even when he took many, many, many annoying minutes to answer Julii's actual question, she never interrupted him. An odd side-effect of Max's verbal diarrhea was his ability to expose even more of his own character flaws, because Max would always go on to shoot himself in the foot.
While talking about being at a meeting with President Jefferson Davies, he would say something stupid like, "Of course, Jefferson Davies had been at the far end of the table and he never actually spoke to me, but none-the-less, the President was there."
The most fascinating thing for Julii was his innocent ignorance. He seemed to have no idea that his additional words were rendering his whole conversation irrelevant and undermining his own credibility. Max had the uncanny ability to marginalize the significance of his own role but seemed to have no idea that he was doing it.
Julii tried a number of subtle ways to rein in his stupidity but, whatever she tried, he could not seem to stop himself. Making a fool of himself was damaging for Max, and Julii saw it as a harmless distraction until she saw what his manifest incompetence was also doing to Count Anton's business.
The way he gave away all sorts of unnecessary concessions during negotiations made Julii decide to work alongside Max in order to make him seem more proficient while, at the same time, making him less of a liability to Count Anton's business. He was a fool, but not a bad person; she would help guide Max to success and, in so doing, benefit her savior.
Much to Julii's amazement, Max had been totally blindsided by her initiative. He had only dropped his guard with her because he saw Julii as a rich white lady, and rich white ladies simply do not work in the South.
Not understanding how Max saw Julii as a threat to his power, Count Anton upset him further by saying: "Did you know Julii has learned three languages within a matter of a few weeks?"
With the pride of a doting father, Count Anton added, "A mind like Julii's will benefit our operation and help you reduce your workload greatly, will it not Max?" Caught in Julii's totally accidental trap, Max could do nothing but agree.
Setting herself the task of reading everything written on every piece of paper in every polished wooden filing cabinet in the office, Julii set to work.
The simplicity of the filing system of buff files hanging in alphabetical order pleased Julii greatly, and it only took two fascinating days and evenings to read everything about the business.
Somehow it all made sense. Julii had no possible reason to know how the practicalities of buying, selling and shipping commodities actually worked, but somehow she did. There was also absolutely no reason for Julii to understand the complexities of shipping vast quantities of goods from one co
untry, which she had never seen and barely even heard of, to another, but, once again, she did.
Everything seemed to be instinctive. It felt like something deep inside her knew exactly what to do with the information that leapt from every page. Unfortunately, Max's errors also leapt from every page, but at the end of it all, Julii believed she had the knowledge required to help him.
On the morning of her first official day at work, Julii gently asked Max a list of questions that concentrated on his most glaringly-obvious mistakes. He remained calm for about the time it took to answer half of one of them before exploding. "You come in here and try to change everything, when everything is working perfectly!"
Julii truly wanted to help Max, but his volatile anger made that impossible. By raising his voice he let an office, full of people who spent half of their working lives fixing his mistakes, know that he believed the business was going well.
Because Julii had only ever told the truth, apart from placing the leaves on her Robert's head when his wound had already healed, she found it hard to understand why Max was annoyed. He had caused all of the problems she wanted to discuss, yet he was angry with her. This was a new human trait, one Julii had not yet come across. She tried a calming tone and said things like, "Let me explain", or "Have you thought about this?", but he was always defensive and didn't want to hear it.
Julii tried explaining logically with calming statements like: "Having read the files, I have found a number of things that do not seem to be working properly to Count Anton's advantage." Then in a soothing tone: "If we change them, you will save time and Count Anton will make more money."
But these exchanges just made Max angrier and more uncomfortable. He even shouted, "This is my office!" and "You don't belong here!"
Julii had trouble understanding these outbursts. 'Of course it was his office.' 'Who else's office could it be?' 'What did the office have to do with anything?' 'What was he trying to communicate to her?' 'What had she missed?'