“That’s true,” Kitty said. “Ambrose, how did you find out?”
Ambrose chewed a mouthful of food with deliberation. “Marse Lawrence like me,” he said. “He tell me.”
“And I suppose that you overheard the rest,” Kitty said.
Ambrose chuckled. “Don’t have to eavesdrop,” he said. “I serve at dinner, and they talk like I ain’t there. Or can’t hear.”
“What else does Mr. Jarvie tell you?” Kitty asked.
Ambrose gave his former mistress a level gaze. “Can’t say,” he told her.
Caro thought, That’s what slaves say when they mean they know but shouldn’t tell.
“Oh, Kitty!” Dulcie cried. “What happen to us? Will they sell us?” She grabbed her husband’s arm. “Split us up and sell us?”
“I don’t know,” Kitty said. “I believe you should ask Ambrose.”
Bel stared at Caro. Through her worry shone a new expression, a ghostly malice. “What about you? Will they sell you?”
Caro had been too upset to eat. Without offering to clear the table or to wash the dishes, she ran from the kitchen to the cabin and slammed the door behind her. She fell heavily onto the dirt floor and buried her face in her hands. Her cheek ached where Susan had slapped her. She began to sob.
The door opened, and her mother knelt beside her. “Caro,” she said softly.
“He never wanted this for us! He wanted to free us!”
Kitty put her arms around Caro and pressed her cheek to Caro’s hair. She rocked Caro back and forth as though she were small again. “Oh, Caro,” she said. “He loved us.”
Caro raised her head to sob. “This is how he loved us!”
Her mother pulled her close, embracing Caro so tightly that the embrace hurt, whispering as though Caro were small again, or ill. “Hush, Caro. Hush.”
Caro struggled free of her mother’s grip. “They hate us. And they can do whatever they please with us.”
Her mother stroked her hair. She whispered, “We don’t know what will happen.”
“I’m not a child,” Caro said, wiping her tears away with her hand. “Don’t lie to me.” She shook her mother off.
She meandered into the side yard, gazing at the house that used to be hers. She burned with anger, wanting to run up the front steps, to enter through the front door, to sit in the library and read any book from the shelf, to shut the door to her room and lie on her bed with the white coverlet. They stole it from us, she thought. They stole us, too.
The side door opened to reveal a slight figure clad in black. It was Emily, gazing back at her.
She started at the sight. Emily approached her, calling softly, “Caroline.”
Caro turned away, bitterness scalding her lips. Do you like my room? she thought. Does it suit you? Does it cheer you any, in that black dress you wear?
Ambrose wouldn’t remind her to talk low. He would probably slap her for disobedience.
Emily came to stand awkwardly before her in the dirt of the yard. Caro couldn’t look up. She was too angry.
Emily reached out her black-gloved hand to gently touch Caro’s wrist, the spot that Missus Susan had grasped and bruised. In a soft, clear voice, Emily said, “I’m sorry.”
As though she meant it! Caro thought, the taste of bile in her mouth.
“Please, look at me,” Emily said, her voice still soft.
Caro bit her lips. She raised her eyes to Emily’s and saw afresh the look of grief that accompanied the black dress, like the hair brooch at her throat.
That night, Caro lay on the coarse blanket that Dulcie had brought her, which offered little comfort on a packed dirt floor. The other slaves had rope beds, but Lawrence and Susan Jarvie wanted no such comfort for James Jarvie’s beloved housekeeper and her daughter.
Beside her, Kitty shifted on her own blanket. Her breath came ragged.
Caro sat up. “Mama, are you crying?”
Her mother’s voice was thick with tears. “I thought you were asleep.”
“Oh, Mama,” Caro said, and in apology for her outburst earlier in the day, she crept close to nestle with her mother. Kitty put her arms around Caro, and even though it was too hot for an embrace, they wept softly in each other’s arms until they fell asleep.
Several hours later, Caro woke in a sweat of fear. The room was so dark that she could see nothing. She had been dreaming, and the dream clung to her, worse than the night’s dense heat or the whine of the mosquitoes that crept through the chinks in the boards.
She sat up, shaking. It woke her mother. “Caro? What is it?”
In the hot fug of a Carolina summer, she shuddered as though she had the ague.
“Caro.” A cool hand on her brow.
It was too dark to see her mother’s face. She said, “A dream—a terrible dream.” She shook anew. “I dreamed you were on the block and I was watching the auction.” She let terror overtake her and sobbed wildly. “I can’t bear it. He never meant this for us! I know he didn’t!”
Her mother took her hand away. All Caro had of her was her disembodied voice. “No, he did not.” Tearless, her mother said, “Tomorrow we will call on Mr. Lawrence Jarvie and appeal to his conscience.”
In the morning, her mother smoothed her skirt and retied her headscarf. She forced her face into a pleasant expression. “How do I look?” she asked. She tossed her head as she had when the diamonds flashed in her earlobes. There were dark circles under her eyes, and she had become gaunt in her figure as well as in her face.
Caro said, “Awful.”
Her mother laughed. “A lady stays a lady, even if she’s dressed in rags,” she said.
“And nigger shoes?”
“And hasn’t washed in days.” Kitty held out her arm. “Shall we?”
Caro took her mother’s proffered arm. “We shall,” she said, with a pluck she didn’t really feel.
When they opened the side door, Ambrose was immediately upon them. “What do you want?”
“I want you to cajole an audience with Marse Lawrence.”
“You know he don’t want to see you,” Ambrose said.
“I’m not asking him. I’m asking you. If you ask him properly, he’ll say yes.”
“What do it concern?”
“It’s for him to hear, not you,” Kitty said impatiently. “Although I know you will, since you listen at the door, like Caro does.”
Ambrose shook his head. “Oh, I shouldn’t let you, but you can still get round me,” he said ruefully, and he left to entreat the man who trusted him enough to talk as though Ambrose wasn’t in the room.
Kitty walked a few steps into the house. Susan didn’t appear, and they advanced into the foyer. Caro glanced up the stairs, and her mother’s eyes followed hers. The portraits of her father and his first wife were gone. In their stead, the wall was shadowed where the paint had stayed fresh.
Ambrose returned. “Come with me.”
In the study, Caro hated the memory that came to her, the look of pleasure on her father’s face on the day that she first translated a page from the Latin. It had been Aesop’s Fables. She could recall the illustrations on the pages as vividly as she could remember the pride in her father’s smile. “Cara,” he had said.
Now the familiar desk was heaped with papers, and atop them, the ledger lay open. Lawrence slapped it shut. He didn’t ask them to sit. “What is it?”
Kitty stood before Lawrence. She held herself as a lady and spoke as one. “Mr. Jarvie, sir, we are yours to dispose of, as you wish. But I beg you to think of your brother and what he wanted for us.”
Lawrence flushed. He said, “That isn’t your concern.”
“Your consideration for your brother? No, it isn’t. But I believe he would have wanted you to grant us the kindness of letting us know what our fate will be.”
Lawrence’s eyes rested on the marks of meanness that his wife had inflicted on Kitty Bennett Jarvie. Distressed, he said, “Jam
es was the soul of kindness.”
“Yes, sir, he was.”
Lawrence didn’t reply, and Kitty pressed on. “He regretted that you were estranged. He always hoped it would be different between the two of you.”
Pain sparked on Lawrence’s face. “How would you know of that?”
Kitty said quietly, “Because he told me. He trusted me with these things.”
As a husband tells a wife.
She added, “If you would honor his memory, treat us with consideration. Let us know what you intend for us.”
Caro saw the grief on Lawrence’s face, which was so much like his daughter Emily’s. He said, “I’m selling the house.”
At the word selling, Caro’s stomach lurched.
“We’re going back to Charleston, and we’ll take everything with us.”
“Everything?” Kitty asked.
“The plates, the china, the paintings, and the servants. All of it.”
“Us, too?”
“The servants,” he repeated. He paused. “All of you.”
Kitty waited, but he was finished.
Caro closed her eyes. The gold-edged china. The crystal glasses that threw rainbows in the midday sunlight. The silver coffee service that Ambrose had brought to her father every morning. She thought of the paintings, already removed from the walls, and hoped that they wouldn’t find their way to the midden.
She and her mother, huddled in the wagon, the chattels to go along with the goods, just as the will described them.
Lawrence said, “Go, both of you,” and he looked down at the desk at the papers before him, dismissing them.
Ambrose was instantly in the room. Caro thought, He heard everything, and suddenly she hated the man who had always been kind to her when she was a young miss.
A week later, the Jarvie goods and chattels were loaded on the ferry that docked at the Beaufort pier. Caro had visited Beaufort before, but she had never taken the ferry to Charleston, only an hour away. When her father was alive, it would have been an embarrassment to decide where she and her mother would sit on the ferry, which was big enough to have a ladies’ parlor as well as a spot for gentlemen. Now there was no question.
She crowded with the slaves and the cargo below decks. The upper decks were well-guarded with railings for ladies to lean against as they gazed over the water. Below, without such an amenity, Caro and her mother sat on the floor, leaning against a trunk, hoping for a sea breeze to counteract the thick, oily smoke from the boiler. Her mother no longer smelled sweetly of lavender but of sweat and stale cloth. I smell just as bad, Caro thought.
She was still heartsick, and she was still in terror that she and her mother would be sold as soon as the Jarvies unpacked their trunks. But she was full of curiosity and also fired by an unreasonable hope for life in Charleston. Her mother’s free relatives lived there. She might meet them and find out why they were free.
The boat hadn’t gone far out to sea. The coast was still in sight. But Caro rose and turned to gaze at the open water of the ocean.
Once in Charleston, Caro watched as the drayman, assisted by Henry and Ambrose, loaded the boxes and trunks into his wagon. He was a short, sturdy man, the same color as his brawny brown horse. He wore a working man’s clothes—a coarse cotton shirt and twill trousers—but they were new and fit him well. He moved with ease, and he sang as he lifted the trunks, grunting as he set them in the wagon bed. Caro recognized the song because the slaves sang it, too: “Poor Rosy.”
He noticed her watching and smiled at her in a fatherly way. He said, “You has big eyes, little miss. Just up from the country?”
“St. Helena Island.”
“Good cotton land,” he said. “First time in Charleston?”
“Yes,” she said, feeling a rush of eagerness.
“One of them Jarvie servants?”
She nodded. “Is Mr. Jarvie your master, too?” She hoped so. He had a friendly face and she hungered for friendliness.
He laughed, a rich, deep sound, like his singing voice. “Got no master,” he said. “I’m a free man.” He set his hand on the edge of the wagon. “Own this cart and own my horse, too.” He called out to the horse, “Good boy, Mose!” He looked at Caro, taking in her pretty face and ragged dress. “What bring you to Charleston?”
Caro’s eyes stung with tears. She told the half-truth for the first time. “My old master died, and Mr. Jarvie brought me here.”
Caro and Kitty, along with the rest of the servants, piled into the wagon. As the wagon jostled its way through the crowded streets, Caro craned her neck to look. Carriages filled the streets, but black people crowded the sidewalks—women carrying baskets, men with tools in their hands. Some of them wore the livery of slavery, but others were dressed in the plain clothes of working people. Caro thought of the drayman and wondered if they were free. She had never lived in a place where black skin signified anything but slavery.
Narrow houses sat on Charleston’s streets. The Jarvie house on Orange Street was like that, set sideways on the lot. The front door was an afterthought. The gate to the side led to the house’s true front, which looked inward to the walkway beside it. Anyone who entered could be watched from the piazzas on either story.
The gate was open, and they jounced on the gravel path to stop at the side door meant for tradesmen and servants. As the drayman helped them out, a tall, thin, light-complected woman, dressed in the neat gray cotton of a house servant, called to them, “Into the kitchen!” as though she were used to being obeyed.
The kitchen was no different from the substantial brick building on the place on St. Helena Island. It even smelled the same, like peas and rice with bacon. Two women stood at the pine table, kneading bread in silence. They glanced at the newcomers and resumed their work.
The woman didn’t invite them to sit. She let them stand in a bedraggled cluster, and she announced, “My name Cressy. Missus Susan’s housekeeper. She tell me all about you, and I get you settled, even though I tell her we don’t need another hand in this house. You nothing but trouble, and I ain’t glad of trouble. Which of you is Ambrose?”
“I am, Miss Cressy.”
“Missus Susan tell me that you Marse Lawrence’s new manservant.”
Ambrose nodded. “What happen to the man before me?”
Cressy gave him a dark look. “Ain’t for you to care, but he go back to Colleton County.” She regarded him with a fierce eye. “He drink. I hope you don’t.”
Ambrose made a big show of being shocked. “No, ma’am, I do not!”
Dulcie said loyally, “Mr. Ambrose a sober man, in every way.”
“I didn’t ask you,” Cressy says. “Who is you, anyway?”
“Dulcie, ma’am, and these are my girls who help me in the kitchen, Peggy and Mattie.”
“You stay here. The cook decide what to do with you.” One of the silent women looked up.
Dulcie nodded. “My man, Henry, and my boy, Hank, they take care of the horses.”
Cressy said, “The stable out back. You go there.” She let her eyes rest on Lydia. “Lady’s maid?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Lydia said shyly.
“I take you in the house.” And at Bel. “You, too.”
She turned her attention to Kitty and Caro. She sniffed and said, “Good Lord! You two stink! And them dresses! Did you come from the rice fields?”
Kitty said, “I was James Jarvie’s housekeeper, and he held me in high regard.”
Cressy snorted. “I’m the housekeeper here.” She peered at Caro. “I hear about you, both of you. Missus Susan don’t want you in the house. Don’t know what we’re going to do about you.”
Kitty took Caro’s hand and clasped it in her own.
Cressy surveyed all her new charges and said, “I take you were you belong.” She waved at Kitty and Caro. “Except for you. You don’t go anywhere. Don’t wander into the yard, and don’t bother them in the kitchen.”
; “What will we do?” Caro asked.
Cressy glared at her. “Miss Susan let me punish anyone who talk back or don’t act right. Keep a switch in here, close to hand. Don’t make me use it.”
Caro’s hand stole to her cheek, where the memory of Susan’s slap still lingered.
They ate in the kitchen, Cressy presiding and dishing out the meager meal of peas and rice. The servants were quiet, their eyes shifting uncomfortably toward the newcomers. Caro thought of the manservant who had been dismissed. The rest of them must be wondering about their fate as well.
Ambrose, who had always presided over the table at the St. Helena place, broke the silence. He addressed the housekeeper. “Ma’am, have you been here long?”
Cressy said, “Did I speak to you?”
“Just trying to be pleasant, Miss Cressy.”
“Disobedient, more like.” Her gaze swept from one newcomer to another. “You all act obedient, or Marse Lawrence send you to the Work House.”
“The Work House, ma’am?” Ambrose would not be cowed.
“Disobedient and ignorant, too. You ain’t never heard of the Work House?” Without waiting for an answer, she said, “You go to the Work House, they punish you proper. Got the lash, got the cat-o’-nine-tails, got the paddles. And no one idle at the Work House. You work the treadmill, and if you don’t step quick, it grind up your foot along with the corn. That’s where you go, if you disobey.”
After dinner, Cressy took Kitty and Caro to the floor above the kitchen, where the heat from the oven and the hearth rose and lingered. Doors lined both sides of a narrow corridor. Cressy unlocked a door and ushered them in.
The room was tiny and sparsely furnished with a narrow rope bed, a rickety chair, and a dresser with drawers that didn’t close right. The window was shut, and the room was so hot that the air was hard to breathe. Caro could feel the heat of the oven beneath her feet.
“You stay here,” Cressy said.
Kitty said, “Can we come down into the kitchen?”
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