VII
Three weeks later, much at Boxhill had changed. George Barton had been laid to rest two days after his passing, and Amanda had already taken the reins of the tobacco plantation into her iron hands. The atmosphere in the house was strained, with most of the slaves grieving for their master while simultaneously suffering under their mistress's demands for unending work. Lilah would not be sorry to sail for Barbados on the Swift Wind at the end of the week. Whenever she thought of Heart's Ease, her breast filled with longing and her eyes with tears. So much had happened to her in the Colonies, it seemed as if she'd been away from her home for years.
At the moment she was bowling along the tree-shaded roads of Mathews County in a well-sprung buggy driven by her stepcousin Kevin Talbott, who had been sent by her father to fetch her home. Kevin had arrived without warning three days earlier. One of the maids had brought him into the back parlor where Lilah had been sitting. When she looked up from her book to see the familiar burly form and weather-beaten face, she cried his name and threw herself into his arms. It was so good to see somebody from home! It was quite a sacrifice for her father to do without his overseer for the length of a voyage to the Colonies and back, Lilah knew, but for his only daughter he would put himself out. And the gesture had paid off handsomely, as Leonard Remy had undoubtedly hoped it would: Less than an hour after Kevin's arrival Lilah had accepted his oft-repeated offer of marriage. Her father's fondest dream had come true: His headstrong daughter was finally engaged to the man of his choice, who would take care of both Lilah and the plantation when Leonard Remy was no longer around to do so.
Lilah, picturing her father's jubilation with a rueful grimace, had already written to inform him of the event, though the letter would probably precede her arrival in person by no more than a week. But she wanted to give him the glad tidings as soon as she possibly could. He would be thrilled, she knew. And she also knew that he would not bother to question the motive behind her unexpected decision to do the sensible thing. So long as Leonard Remy got his own way, such details would not concern him. But if truth were told, Lilah had suffered a severe jolting in matters of the heart.
For the first and only time in her life she had trembled on the brink of falling in love, only to have her pretty dream tumble down around her head like a house of cards. The image of Jocelyn San Pietro still troubled her nights, though she forced herself not to think about him during her waking hours. He was gone, removed from her life as completely as if he had died. The man for whom she had felt that violent attraction was a slave, a man of another race. He was as forbidden to her as marriage to a priest. Lilah knew it, accepted it, and tried not to dwell on it. Obviously she could not trust her own feelings when it came to men. Kevin was her father's choice for her, and he would make a kind husband. She would have him-before her untrustworthy heart could betray her again. There would be no more disastrous moonlight dalliances for her.
Through the slave grapevine at Boxhill she had learned that there had been a hasty legal proceeding held the day after Uncle George's death. There Joss was indeed adjudged to be a descendant of the octoroon Victoria, chattel of Boxhill, and George Barton, and thus was legally a chattel himself of Boxhill. He was no longer a free man; no, that was wrong. He had never been a free man, although he had not had the slightest inkling that he had been born a slave. Her great-aunt owned him like a horse or a gown or any of the other slaves at Boxhill, and held his ultimate fate in her hands. From the malevolence of Amanda's actions on that awful night, Lilah guessed that the existence of this illegitimate grandson of her husband's had opened up some old wounds. Uncle George had gotten the slave girl Victoria with child while wed to Amanda, right under the old lady's nose in fact. Amanda was fiercely proud, and had very likely been in love with her husband. The wound would be deep, and her vengeance would be severe. Lilah felt sick whenever she thought of Joss's probable fate. Her aunt would not be kind to him, and even if she were, to go from a free man to slave in the space of an evening must be a fate worse than death.
Sitting there in the buggy beside Kevin, with the breeze blowing tendrils of her hair loose from beneath the brim of her bonnet and the sun shining warmly down all around, Lilah had a sudden mental picture of that lean, handsome face that was so vivid it was almost as if Joss stood before her. She shuddered, and closed her eyes to blot him out. She could not bear thinking of him. His fate was tragic-but it was a mercy that it had happened when it did. If the truth had been revealed a few days later, the tragedy from her point of view would have increased a hundredfold. She would have fallen in love with him, allowed him to take uncounted liberties with her person, maybe even have wed him. And such a thing was unthinkable. If people somehow found out that she'd let him kiss her, she'd be shunned…
"You don't mind if I don't take you straight back to
Boxhill, do you?" Kevin was saying. "If I'm going to get to that slave auction, I need to head on over to town. I didn't realize that you'd be visiting so long with Miss Marsh, or I'd have made arrangements to have someone else drive you."
A slave auction fit in so well with her thoughts that Lilah mentally recoiled. "I'd really rather not."
"Come on, Lilah, be a sport. You know I promised your father I'd bring back a new contingent of field hands with us on the Swift Wind. Ordinarily I'd take you home first, but the auction's at three o'clock and-"
"Oh, I know. Anything for Heart's Ease. All right, all right, I'll go with you," Lilah capitulated, summoning a smile for her fiance. He was really a nice sort; she'd known him since she was eight years old and he already a man of twenty-two, and he was going to be her husband and the father of her children. She was determined to be agreeable to him if it killed her. Marriages became what one made them, after all, and she meant for hers to be a success. Slaves and slave auctions were something she preferred not to think about at this time, but she would go if Kevin wished her to. Joss San Pietro was an unfortunate chapter in an otherwise serene life, and she was going to put him very firmly from her mind. Doubtless she had imagined the strength of the attraction she had felt for him because she had quite simply been ripe to fall in love. She had willed herself into it, and that was that. The plain truth of the matter was that she had barely known the man.
"If you've any shopping to do in town, I'll be glad to drop you off wherever you wish and pick you up afterwards. Maybe you could get some silk for your wedding dress, or something."
"I'll be wearing Mother's," Lilah answered automatically, her mind not really on the conversation. Her mother had died shortly after Lilah's birth, and Lilah could not remember her at all. Jane, her stepmother and
Kevin's aunt, had come to live at Heart's Ease as her governess when Lilah was five, and had married her father two years later. Jane was kind and good and meek, and suited her blustery father perfectly. But Lilah still sometimes felt a sneaking longing for the mother she had never known.
"Well, what about a new hat? Not that that confection on your head is not charming, of course."
"Thank you." She smiled at him again. He grinned at her in response, his broad, weathered face beneath his thick thatch of tobacco-brown hair turning ruddy with pleasure. Since she had accepted his proposal, Kevin had been the happiest of men. (And why not? one unruly part of her brain kept asking. He was, after all, getting a young and beautiful bride and one of the richest sugar plantations in Barbados in one neat package.) But she… she was having to sternly quell second thoughts. This marriage was the sensible tiling to do. If Kevin was not precisely the handsome, charming prince of her dreams, well, what of it? Real life was not about dreams, and it was time she accepted that fact. She could make a success of her marriage if she would. And she would!
Mathews Court House was a bustling little town with neat brick-and-frame shops lining cobbled streets. Ladies in their high-waisted, beribboned pastel gowns and deep-brimmed sunbonnets hurried along the streets laden with parcels or shepherding recalcitrant children, some with their more sob
erly clad menfolk in tow. Here and there she saw acquaintances in the street or in other passing carriages, and she waved to them with a smile. Everywhere her greeting was returned, and she felt a measure of relief.
Lilah had not been sure of her reception socially since that night in the summerhouse. People had been bandying her name about these last three weeks, and she was only glad that the gossip did not seem to have reached Kevin's ears. Exactly what had happened be- tween Lilah and Jocelyn San Pietro was not known, but people were aware that she'd spent a great deal of time alone with him on that fateful night. The memory of her reckless behavior, however, was already fading from the collective consciousness. She had begun to hope that the saga of Jocelyn San Pietro had entered local folklore and been largely forgotten. After all, many of the gentlemen hereabouts had fathered children with their slave mistresses. What made it all so scandalous was that Joss had spent his life as a white man-and that George Barton had died when he'd turned up. Lilah's involvement added just a minor fillip to the story.
More carriages were heading toward the center of town than away, and Lilah supposed that the slave auction was the reason. Slavery was the lifeblood of the great plantations both in the American South and in Barbados. While it wasn't always a pleasant labor system, it was the only way to run the cotton, sugar and tobacco plantations profitably. Slave women were, as a rule, poor breeders, and the only way to replenish the stock of laborers needed to work the fields was to buy them. This had to be done frequently, requiring substantial infusions of cash. The house slaves, of course, were a different breed than the field hands. There was as much difference between a gullah, which was how most of the planters referred to slaves brought fresh from Africa to work the fields, and a gentleman's longtime slave majordomo as there was between a street urchin and a lord in Britain. Many of the house slaves were as much a part of the family as her own Betsy, or Boot, who mourned George Barton more than his own wife did.
The site of the slave auction would be the front and rear lawns of the courthouse, which was an imposing brick building in the center of town. Both lawns were required because there were really two different auctions. The more valuable slaves, house servants, prime field hands and the like, were auctioned off in the front.
The rear faced a street known locally as Cheapside, and it was there that the old, injured, recalcitrant or for some other reason less valuable merchandise was sold.
"Shall I drop you off somewhere?"
From the lack of enthusiasm in Kevin's voice, Lilah realized that he was not eager to do so, and guessed that he feared that if he was late he would lose a chance to bid on the best of the field hands. So she shook her head, and got her reward as he smiled at her.
"You're a trump, Lilah! What a team we'll make!"
Lilah smiled in response to that too, which since she had accepted him seemed to be all that was required of her to keep him happy. Kevin maneuvered the buggy into the narrow space some two streets over (all the closer spaces had been taken by earlier arrivals) jumped down, and held up his hands to assist Lilah down. His grip on her waist was not unpleasant. When he kept his hands on her for a moment after her feet touched the ground, she managed another smile at him quite easily. He squeezed her waist lightly and released her. Lilah took the arm he offered her, resting her fingers lightly on the fine wool covering the brawny forearm and refused to think of the last masculine arm she had held that way. Talking lightly of desultory things, they made their way to the auction.
The caliber of slaves Kevin was interested in for Heart's Ease would be sold on the upper side, so they headed toward the courthouse's porticoed front. Lilah shortly found herself standing near the front of the crowd gathered before a narrow wooden platform raised perhaps three feet off the ground. On it stood the nattily dressed auctioneer extolling the virtues of a stripped-to- the-waist field hand, age, the auctioneer swore, no more than nineteen. Damon, as the auctioneer named him, was ebony-skinned and heavily muscled, and Lilah was not surprised when Kevin jumped right into the binding. When Damon was knocked down to Kevin for the princely sum of five hundred dollars, the slave grinned from ear to ear, proud of the price he'd brought. He was tagged and at a signal from Kevin led away, to be picked up later that day.
The auction passed swiftly. As it neared the end Lilah lost what little interest she'd had in the proceedings and wandered away. Kevin had bought ten prime field hands for Heart's Ease, as well as a likely-looking mulatto girl who he said could help Maisie, the cook, in the kitchen. His bidding completed unless something that looked exceptionally good should come along, he had fallen into conversation with the gentleman standing next to him, and they were deep in discussion about alternate methods of irrigation. Lilah made her way around the crowd toward the back of the courthouse. No one could accuse Kevin of a lack of interest in his chosen line of work, she thought.
Without any destination in mind, Lilah found herself skirting the edge of the far different crowd attending the auction on Cheapside. The people here were less prosperous formers and merchants and even white trash who had scraped together enough money to buy an inferior slave or two. Unlike his counterpart on the upper side, this auctioneer was shabbily dressed and raucous, extolling the virtues of a stooped old man with a weary look in his eyes.
"Amos here got a lotta years left in him. And he's stronger than he looks. Why, he can still lift a hoe with the best of 'em, cain't ya, Amos?"
Amos nodded his grizzled head dutifully. But the bidding was unenthusiastic, and in the end he was knocked down for only a hundred dollars to a burly farmer with a mean look in his eyes. Lilah felt a vague pity for Amos as she turned around to head back to the front, where she felt more comfortable. The noise level on this side was giving her a headache, and there was a definite smell of unwashed bodies emanating from the crowd. Besides, Kevin would be wondering where she had gone…
"Now here we have a fine young buck, Joss by name, strong as an ox. Just needs to be broke to bridle a little bit. What am I bid?"
"Why, that's a white man!"
"Nah, lie's high yeller. Don' you remember hear- in'…?"
"Lookit the chains on 'im! He must be a mean'un! I wouldn't have 'im at any price!"
"I'll give fifty dollars!"
"Fifty dollars! Come on, Mr. Collier! Once he's broke, he'll be worth five hundred sure!" The auctioneer refuted the low bid indignantly.
"Yeah, if he don' kill somebody in the breakin'! Or if ya don' end up havin' to kill him!"
While this exchange was going on between the auctioneer and a man in the crowd, Lilah glanced up at the auction block and froze. He was dirty, his hair matted and tangled, his mustache gone. Instead what looked like a two-week growth of beard darkened his jaw. He was barefoot, clad only in a pair of tattered breeches that Lilah realized with a shock were the remnants of the buff ones he'd been wearing that fateful night, with something that was more rag than shirt clinging to his shoulders. His chest was mostly bare, revealing corded muscles and glimpses of rib, with a thick wedge of black hair in the center. His mouth was swollen and there was a crust of dried blood at the corner. At the moment it was distorted by a feral snarl. A livid purple bruise extended across his left cheekbone, and there was a half- healed cut on his right temple. Lilah felt her heart stop as she looked at the muscles popping out of the nearly bare arms because his hands were tied so tightly behind his back. A chain linked his ankles, and another chain secured him to a post at the rear of the auction block. Despite his changed appearance, there was no mistaking
Joss. Staring helplessly, Lilah felt nausea rise up in her throat, and had to swallow to hold it back. Oh, dear God, that he had been reduced to this… The reality of Amanda's revenge was more dreadful than what she had ever imagined.
"Who'll go a hundred? A hundred dollars for a fine young buck!" The auctioneer, keeping a wary distance from the goods he was trying to sell, scanned the crowd. "He's a bargain at the price!"
"I'll go sixty!" a man called.
"Sixty dollars! Why, that's almost crime! You'll get arrested if you take him away for that, Sam Johnson! Come on, folks! I want a hundred!"
"Let's see his back, Neely! I'll wager he's been whipped within an inch of his life! Who needs a troublemaker, huh?"
"Yeah, Neely, let's see his back!"
Reluctantly, the auctioneer yielded to crowd pressure. "Turn around, boy!" he said to Joss.
"Go to hell!" was the growled response. It was clearly audible even to Lilah, who stood in the back row. The auctioneer, scowling, motioned to a couple of burly men who stood on either side of the platform. They climbed up and wrestled the recalcitrant victim around, stripping off the tattered shirt in the process. The exposed back was raw and red, marked with crisscrossing welts. Lilah felt nausea threaten again. She pressed a hand to her mouth, afraid she might actually vomit.
"I withdraw my bid!" yelled the man who had gone sixty dollars.
"Mine stands!" said the fifty-dollar bidder, who added in an aside to the crowd in general: "Hell, you can't buy hog slop that cheap! And if he gives me too much grief, that's just what he'll be-hog slop!"
There was a murmur of sympathetic agreement from the crowd as Joss, released by the burly guards, turned to face them. His face was livid with fury, and with the muscles of his arms and chest tensed and bulging he looked dangerous. In no way did he resemble the dashing, laughing stranger who had flirted with her so boldly and almost stolen her heart. They had made him into a beast, and her heart bled for him.
Desire in the Sun Page 5