Charlotte said, “The last marriage the reverend performed was between slaves. And that was mobbed. Don’t laugh so, Anna.”
“Don’t preach so, Charlotte. There’s no debating society for young ladies.” She leaned backward and called to the head of the table. “Danny! Will you speak again at the Society?”
Charlotte laughed. “I’d go to the Clionian Debating Society if Danny were to speak again. He’s as eloquent as a minister.”
“Or a politician!” Anna said.
“Anna! As though a colored man could rise in politics in South Carolina!”
At their giddy talk, Caro felt dizzy. This was the world she had missed, the round of flirtations, engagements, marriages, lectures, and amusements of the free people of color in Charleston. They were as merry as the idle children of the richest planters. Listening to them, no one would ever know that all week long, they toughened their hands with the labor of the needle.
Charlotte addressed Caro, who divided her attention between a slice of cake and a scoop of watermelon ice. She said, “That dress suits you beautifully.”
Caught unawares, Caro chewed and swallowed. “Thank you.”
“Did you alter it yourself?”
“Yes, I did.”
“I’ll tell Papa. He’ll be glad to know that you can sew.”
“Yes, I can,” Caro said quietly.
Charlotte addressed Anna again. She said, “Did you hear that Papa’s best tailor is leaving Charleston?”
“Mr. Johnson?” Anna asked.
“He’s going to Canada. He says he’s lost faith in Charleston. It’s no place for a man of color anymore. He has family there already. They left after the Fugitive Slave Act, don’t you remember?”
“Oh yes. They wrote to us last winter, didn’t they, Charlotte?”
Charlotte chuckled. “They said that they were free to be colder than they’d ever been in their lives. And that the tailoring business in Toronto is dreadful. No one in Canada will patronize a colored tailor.”
“And Mr. Johnson is set on going? To freeze and starve in Toronto?”
Charlotte said, “Yes, all for freedom in Toronto.”
Caro set down her fork. She had eaten too much, and suddenly she felt ill. If it was cold in Oberlin, Ohio, she wouldn’t mind it. To be free in Oberlin, Ohio! She wished she could excuse herself. She needed a breath of air, even if it were Charleston’s air, hot and humid and saturated with slavery.
When the Bennetts finally let her go, she escaped to the sidewalk and took a deep breath, savoring the smell of azalea and not minding the smell of rot. Her head was still swimming. As she steadied herself, Danny ran down the steps to tug gently on her sleeve.
She thought that his eyes were a light brown, but they were changeable. Now they were green.
He said, “I wanted to apologize for the way my mother spoke to you.”
She nodded.
“She’s very hopeful of my future and fierce in protecting me.” He let his hand rest on her pagoda sleeve. “She expects great things of me.”
“Perhaps you’ll be the first colored politician in South Carolina,” she teased.
He said, “Before my father died, he wanted to make provision for me to attend college. But he could not, and now all I have is the money I save from my wages and my mother’s encouragement.”
“College?” she asked. “Did he want you to go up North?”
“He hoped to send me abroad. To London or Edinburgh. He said that Scotland had so few people of color that no one would show any prejudice against me.”
“Scotland!” she said, laughing. “Not someplace like Oberlin in Ohio?”
Now he laughed, too. He had very white teeth, pearlescent in his pale-brown face, and a full, rosy mouth. “Oberlin!” he said. “No South Carolinian should go to Oberlin, even a person of color. They eat abolitionism for breakfast, spread on their toast like jam!”
He leaned toward her and let his hand slip down her arm to touch the wrist that the pagoda sleeve left bare. He dropped his voice. “I can talk to Uncle Thomas about giving you work,” he said.
“The business about hiring out—”
He leaned closer. “Let me talk to him,” he repeated.
The door flew open, and Anna, the worst chatterer among the Bennett girls, called out, “Danny! Your mother says that you’re to stop flirting with Caro and come inside!”
He let go of her arm, but he smiled before he ran up the stairs.
The next day, Sophy told her that someone wanted her at the gate. “You get more visitors than Marse Lawrence and Missus Susan,” she grumbled.
“Who is it?”
“A boy.”
Kitty looked up. “I’ll see who it is,” she said.
Caro trembled. Was it Danny? She flew to the gate, letting her mother lag behind her.
But it was someone else.
Kitty asked, “Who are you, and what do you want?” It was her haughty tone. Caro had never known until today how much her mother could sound like her estranged half sister.
Caro thought the messenger was white until she recalled that it was a younger Pereira whose skin glowed even lighter than his fair-skinned brothers and cousins. She said, “Mama, it’s Danny’s little brother, Ben.”
He said to Caro, “My mother, Mrs. Pereira, wants to see you. She’ll be at home this afternoon.”
“Did she say why?”
Ben Pereira regarded her with the supercilious expression that all the Pereiras could summon. “We live on Montagu Court,” he said. “This afternoon, at three o’clock.”
Kitty said, “You can tell her that her sister, Kitty Bennett Jarvie, will be there as well.”
Ben’s face registered surprise. Kitty repeated, “Her sister. Catherine Bennett. She’ll know who I am, even if you don’t.”
Puzzled, even a little deflated, Ben said, “Yes, ma’am,” as he left.
Kitty turned to Caro. “I’ll be paying a call this afternoon,” she said.
“You’d go with me? To see her?”
“I won’t abandon you to her,” her mother said.
“Like that?” Caro gestured at the ragged dress.
Her mother’s hands went to her earlobes. She fingered the spot where the earbobs had once dazzled, and she drew herself up very straight. “As I am,” she said. “Without charity from anyone. You put on the pretty dress they gave you. You’ll have to do for both of us.”
Her mother stopped on the sidewalk to observe the house on Montagu Court. Like the Bennett house, it was a two-story wooden single with fresh paint and well-tended shrubbery in front. She said, “She’s done very well for herself, if she owns it.”
At the front door, her mother hesitated. Caro asked, “What is it, Mama?”
“I never thought I’d do this,” she said, unable to raise her hand to the knocker.
“I will.” Caro rapped on the front door.
Maria herself answered it. She lost her composure. “What are you doing here?” she demanded of Kitty.
Caro watched as Kitty took in Maria’s substance and comfort, and Maria took in Kitty’s ill fortune.
Her mother smiled. “Is that the best you can do, Maria? After not seeing me for twenty years?”
With ill grace, Maria said, “Come inside.”
She ushered them into the parlor, which was austerely furnished in the Georgian style of the late eighteenth century still so prevalent in Charleston decades later. A dainty sofa stood against the far wall, and a Sheraton chair upholstered in brocade—a little faded but still good—stood before each window, a nest of little tables next to one and a piecrust table next to the other.
“It’s lovely, Maria,” her mother said, as though she had been made welcome.
Maria inclined her head but didn’t reply.
A round mirror, its frame ornate and gilded, hung on the far wall, and Caro saw herself reflected in it, her face a little drawn above the che
erful print of her dress.
Maria didn’t offer them refreshment, but she said curtly, “Sit down.” Kitty took the settee, the best piece of furniture in the room, where she could spread her narrow skirt and command a good view of her sister. Caro perched on a side chair. She felt like an unwelcome cat and was ready to leap up and run.
Maria spoke to Kitty as though Caro weren’t there, slighting them both. “She has a pretty face. Your face, when you were younger.”
“She takes after her father, too.”
“As though that helps her!”
“Don’t speak against my father,” Caro said.
Maria ignored her. She spoke to Kitty again. “I don’t want her angling after my son.”
“Why would she do that?” Kitty asked, as though Caro were an heiress the young men yearned after.
“If she thinks that her pretty face will make her fortune—if that’s something you encouraged her to think—she’s a fool.”
Her mother bristled. Caro wondered if these sisters had always been like this. The canny one and the pretty one. They must have been.
Maria said, “You always were a fool, Kitty. All those years in James Jarvie’s house, and what did you have to show for it?”
Her mother’s hand stole to her earlobe.
“I heard that Mrs. Susan Jarvie stripped you of the dress on your back.” She stared at her half sister. “Now I know it.”
“Aunt Maria!” Caro pleaded.
“Don’t call me that,” Maria snapped. “What did he leave you besides a daughter with a pretty face?”
Her mother raised her dark, expressive eyes to her half sister’s. She held herself in a lady’s posture, despite the ruin of her dress. “His love,” she said firmly. “James loved me.”
“Love!” Maria snorted. “There’s no profit in love. By the time Mr. Pereira died, I had this house and everything in it.” She gestured around the room. “I had two rental properties in my name that give me income, even now. I had two slaves that I hire out, who bring me a living. And what do you have, Kitty?” She looked as though she would spit. “Did he free you? Either of you?”
Her mother smiled. How could she remain so calm? When she spoke, she had found the poison to put in the sugar. “Has it ever occurred to you, Maria, that your father freed you because he loved your mother as he never loved mine?” She dropped her eyes and her voice. “Was that worth so little?”
Maria’s face darkened. “I don’t know why he freed me. He never told me why. But I know that he sold you a week after your mother died.”
“Wasn’t I worthy?” Kitty asked, her voice still soft. “An orphan of twelve?”
As though Maria had received rather than given the hurt, she said to her half sister, “I don’t want to see you.” She turned her attention to Caro. “Nor you, anywhere near my son. Now go.” She extended her hands in a gesture to sweep them away.
The door shut very firmly behind them as they departed.
On the sidewalk again, her mother said to her, “Now you know why we’re estranged.”
“Oh, Mama,” Caro said miserably, thinking of her mother, orphaned and sold away to James Jarvie. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I never speak of it.” Her tone locked it away again. She gazed at the neat house with its sparkling windows. “And in case you’re wondering, I don’t want you angling for that boy, either.”
A few days later, when the bell at the gate jangled, Sophy went to answer it. She came back, smiling broadly. “Another visitor,” she said. “That handsome young man who bring you the dress. Name of Danny.”
Caro flew to the gate. Danny stood just inside, shaded by the crape myrtles. He smiled broadly, too. “Uncle Thomas sent me,” he said. “He wants you to come to the shop right away.”
“Is it about the sewing? The hiring out?”
His smile told her that it was.
“What happened to change his mind?” Caro asked.
“I don’t know. But I do know that he and my mother had quite a fight about it.” He laughed. “I didn’t have to stand at the keyhole listening. You could hear it all over the house!”
So he knew that trick, too. “What was the fight about?”
“Uncle Thomas told my mother that how he ran his business was none of hers, and she said it was, if he was going to hire a slave’s daughter to flirt with her son. And he put his foot down, telling her that he could assure her that it was a matter of business and only a matter of business, if that would satisfy her. I never heard him raise his voice like that. She got very sulky and told him that it had better remain a matter of business, or he’d hear from her. He reminded her that he was the head of the family, and she owed him more respect than that. Oh, she didn’t like it! She was sulky with all of us afterward.” He reached for her hands. “Come now. Come with me.”
At the shop, Thomas spoke to her with a tailor’s tact. He said, “We’re very pressed now that Mr. Johnson is gone. The rest of my men can handle the tailoring, but it would be a great help to send out the shirts. Can you do finish work?”
“Oh yes. Plain sewing, fine sewing, and buttonholes, too.”
“Could you show me? Sew a sample?”
“Of course.” She asked, “The hiring out. I thought it was a difficulty.”
“I made some inquiries.”
She felt a stab of fear. “Did you talk to Mr. Jarvie?”
“It wasn’t necessary. I’m satisfied that he’s indifferent to how you manage. As long as you’re discreet, it won’t be a problem.”
“Thank you, Uncle Thomas,” she said. She was pleased. Why did tears rise to her eyes?
“Come in back.”
The workroom had none of the elegance of the shopfront. Thomas’s workers and apprentices, needles in hand, sat elbow-to-elbow at a large table. Cloth crowded every unused space, and the tickle of cottony lint and the scratch of wool filled the air.
Thomas said to Danny, “Give her some scraps to test her sewing.”
He rummaged among the bits of cloth. Thomas found her a chair to perch on and gave her the scraps and a threaded needle. “A plain seam and a felled one,” Thomas said to Caro. “Danny, I need to be in front. Let me know when she’s finished.”
As Danny watched her, she made her best effort to make the tiniest and firmest stitches and fell the seam so that it would lie flat and not be felt against the skin, as her mother had taught her. She sewed more carefully than she had ever sewed, and finally she said to Danny, “I’m done.”
“I’ll fetch Uncle Thomas.”
Thomas bent over the cloth to see how straight the seams were. He pulled the fabric apart, testing the strength of the stitching. He ran his finger over the felling, as Caro had thought he would, satisfied at how flat it was. “It will do,” he said to Caro, in a professional rather than a familial tone. “Danny, how many shirts have we pieced and not yet sewn?”
“Half a dozen, I think.”
“Bundle them up for Miss Caroline to work on.”
As Danny wrapped the shirts, Thomas said, “I’ll give you fifty cents for a shirt. The seams and the finishing.” Was that a glimmer of familial feeling?
“Thank you, Uncle Thomas,” she said.
He handed her the bundle, and his face softened. “Give your mother my best regards,” he said. Much more than a glimmer. What an odd family the Bennetts were. “And my deepest condolences.”
Chapter 7: A Southern Voice
“Emily, where are you going?” Susan asked as she descended the stairs.
Emily fastened her cloak. “Out for a bit of air.”
“Don’t you want to take the carriage?”
Emily laughed. “That would defeat the purpose of taking the air,” she said. “Just to the market and back.”
Susan took Emily’s hands. “You’re livelier since you came back from the pines,” she said.
“The cold air does me good. It makes me feel brisk!” She sm
iled at the memory of Joshua Aiken.
“Well, go on, then. But don’t take a chill!”
“I won’t,” Emily said, pleased that her stepmother was pleased. She ran down the great marble staircase with a nimble stride.
Since she accepted Mr. Aiken’s offer, Emily traveled through Charleston with new eyes. She studied the places and the sights she knew so well, wondering what might interest a northern lady, deliberating how she might turn the familiar into the exotic for her hypothetical visitor. She now took her sketchbook with her—she had learned to draw at Madame Devereaux’s, too—hoping that something might strike her and spark her thoughts for the sketch in words to accompany the drawing.
At the market, she lingered and looked. She listened, too. Did the street sellers in northern cities sing like the porgy man and the oyster women of Charleston? Above the rest, a familiar voice rose: “Eggs so fresh, eggs so fine…” It was Sophy, extolling the eggs in the basket at her feet, and beside her stood Caroline.
Caro wore a plain gray cotton dress, but it was whole and new, and above it, she had tied a scarf bright with flowers that enlivened her face. She spoke to a stout woman with a basket over her arm whose badge proclaimed her as a servant. Emily overheard her with surprise. She spoke the dialect of the Low Country, the speech drenched in the rhythms of Africa, as though she’d been born to it.
“Miss Emily!” Sophy called. She held up a fragile orb. “This the last of them. Do you need an egg?”
Emily laughed. “Ask Dulcie,” she said. “She is the general of the kitchen, and of eggs!” She turned to Caro. “Caroline,” she said.
“Yes, Miss Emily?” The Low Country accent was gone. The planter’s daughter spoke in her place.
“You look better,” Emily said, touching her head to indicate the scarf.
“Thank you, Miss Emily.”
“Did my inquiries help? About the washing?”
Caro inclined her head. Evidently not, but she replied with tact, “I thank you for it, Miss Emily.” She gestured toward Sophy. “Sophy employs me in the market, and that helps us, too.”
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