Emily pulled out her sketchbook.
The front door opened, and Mr. Herriot ran jauntily down the stairs. He was young, not yet thirty, and dressed like a man of fashion in a tall beaver hat and a tight-fitting frock coat. “Miss Jarvie!” he greeted her. “What are you doing here?”
She lifted the sketchbook. “Just making a sketch,” she said. “The house is so handsome. I wanted to draw it.”
He laughed. His teeth were white, and the canines were sharp. “Oh, it will be yours soon enough,” he said.
“Sir, what are those fearsome spikes on the fence?”
“You don’t know the story? My father put them there after the slave uprising. The Vesey rebellion.” He added, “They’re called chevaux-de-frise. They were used in wartime to deter an assault.”
Charlestonians had a long memory. The ghost of Denmark Vesey, who was successful in rousing the slaves of Charleston nearly four decades ago, still haunted them. And those who came originally from San Domingo, where the slaves’ rebellion was bloody and successful, still recalled its terror in their nightmares, and they had passed on these stories to their children.
Emily said, “Surely they aren’t needed anymore. Isn’t the fence deterrent enough?”
Mr. Herriot lost his smile. “We hear more of rebellion from the North every day,” he said. “They would delight in driving our slaves to insurrection. We may have need of those spikes yet.”
“I hope not,” Emily murmured, and she raised her eyes to the fence again. She wondered if the iron spikes would interest a northern lady or if she would recoil from them. It was peculiar to look at everything familiar as though she had never seen it before.
Several days later, she walked briskly toward the office of Mr. Pereira. In her pocket was an encouraging letter from Mr. Aiken. He had written to tell her that Hearth and Home’s readers had enjoyed the work of “A Southern Voice,” and he had enclosed their letters so that she could read them herself. Emily had never realized that writing for publication, unlike writing in a diary, was a kind of conversation.
Mr. Pereira greeted her, settled her comfortably in his office, and bade his servant to bring her a cup of coffee. He asked, “How can I help you, Miss Jarvie?”
She said, “Caroline told me that you would be discreet.”
“How is she?” he asked.
“She’s well, sir.”
His swarthy face grew grave. “Are you in a scrape, Miss Jarvie?”
“Oh no,” she said. She drew the bank drafts from her pocket to show him. “It’s a little matter of money. Just a trifle. I want to keep it safe, but I don’t want to trouble my father about it.”
He took the bank drafts from her, examining them closely, turning them over to read the back as well as the front. He said, “As long as there’s no irregularity in the way you came by them, Miss Jarvie, there shouldn’t be a difficulty.”
“Irregularity?” She wrinkled her brow, pretending to a deeper naivete than she truly had.
“I shouldn’t press you so. Three dollars is too little for a debt of honor or an embarrassment at the dressmaker’s. But I’m curious why a bank in Ohio has sent you any sum, even one as small as three dollars.”
She blushed and was glad of it because she knew it would discomfit him. “I met the editor of an Ohio magazine in Sumter County,” she said. “He’s distant kin to the Aikens. He asked me to write a squib for his magazine, and when I did, he paid me for it.” She looked archly at Mr. Pereira. “Is that irregular, sir?”
He said, “Not in the legal meaning. But I know your father, and I can see that it might disquiet him to see his daughter’s name in print.”
She leaned forward. “He won’t,” she said. “I use a nom de plume.”
Holding the notes between his fingers, he asked, “What would you like to do with your earnings, Miss Jarvie?”
“I’d like to save them. I don’t know how. I hoped you could help me with that, sir.”
He set the notes on his desk and regarded them as though they represented a much greater sum than three dollars. “It’s no trouble to open a bank account in your name,” he said. “I can make the arrangement with the Bank of Charleston.”
“Do I need to visit the bank?”
“Not at all. They can send me the papers, and you can come here to sign them.”
“Thank you, sir.” She asked, “Do I owe you a consideration?”
He smiled. “Don’t trouble yourself,” he said. “I would do it for James’s memory, even if your father hadn’t retained me to settle the estate. I consider it my duty to the Jarvie family.”
She said softly, “You were a good friend to my Uncle James, were you not?”
A faint shadow of grief crossed his face. “I was.”
“You must miss him a great deal.”
The shadow deepened. “I do.”
“Please, sir, don’t let my father know that I’ve asked you to help me.”
“I’ll keep it in confidence. He won’t know unless you tell him yourself, Miss Jarvie.”
When she returned to the house on Orange Street, her stepmother called to her from the parlor. “Emily, is that you?”
“Yes, Mother.”
“Ambrose told me you’d gone out for a walk. In this weather!”
She laughed. “It suits me, Mother.”
Susan said, “Well, you are sprightlier these days since you came back from Sumter County. Is it more than exercise, Emily? Did you meet someone in Sumter County to make your eyes sparkle?”
Emily was suddenly wary. “What did Nancy write to you?”
“She said that after insulting their nearest neighbor, a Mr. John Ellison, you went out of your way to be cordial to him.”
“He invited us to dine, and he showed me his place. Charles accompanied us. He has a stable of very fine horses, and Charles and I both admired them,” she said, unable to suppress a blush.
Susan smiled. “When we return to Sumter County in the summer, will you be cordial to him again?”
“Of course, Mother.”
“Did you write to that forward man at the magazine? The one who pressed a subscription on you?”
“I did,” Emily said. “There won’t be any more trouble about a subscription.”
Her stepmother rose and laid her hand on Emily’s cheek. “You’re a good girl, Emily,” she said. “I couldn’t have asked for a better daughter.”
“Thank you, Mother,” she said.
As she ran up the stairs to her room, she thought, I have become such a deceiver.
She closed the door, and with her newly widened eyes, she looked at herself. The dressing table mirror revealed the sparkle that her stepmother had seen in her eyes and a flush of pink in her cheeks. The black dress was at odds with the lively expression on her face. She picked up Robert’s portrait and waited for it to speak to her. Instead, she saw the animated face of Joshua Aiken and heard his voice, as though he had read his letters aloud to her.
But in her palm, the portrait was nothing more than a scrap of painted ivory. Robert had gone. She opened the drawer of the dressing table and gently laid the portrait in its farthest corner, where she would never see it.
She was free of Robert’s ghost, and her freedom dizzied her.
Chapter 8: Love Is Sweet
As Caro sat at breakfast with Sophy and her mother, Sophy asked, “What do you and Miss Emily whisper about the last time she visit?”
Kitty asked, “What are you talking about, Sophy?”
Caro thought of her promise to help Emily deceive her father and blushed. She said, “Miss Emily wanted me to read something she wrote.”
“Why she ask you?” Sophy sounded surprised.
“Sophy, she knows I can read. That’s no secret. She wanted my opinion of it.”
Kitty regarded Caro with surprise. Sophy said, “That’s the oddest thing I ever hear.”
Caro’s opinion of herself had risen sin
ce she had begun to work for her uncle Thomas and earn decent money for it. “Why shouldn’t she ask me? I’m educated, just like she is.”
Her mother said thoughtfully, “It’s not a bad thing to have an ally in the Jarvie house.”
Sophy snorted. “Ally! She have a kinder heart than her daddy, that’s certain. But she only your friend as long as it suit her, Miss Sass. When it don’t, she forget all about you. Don’t fool yourself because she bring a shawl and a book.”
Sophy’s words stung. Sophy was usually right, an authority derived from experience. As Caro left the table to go to the post office, she allowed herself a moment of doubt as to why she was abetting Emily Jarvie in lying to her father.
But Caro kept her promise to Emily. Every week, she hastened to the post office on East Bay Street to ask for letters addressed to Lawrence’s sister. Whenever a letter came from Ohio, Caro relished her part in Emily’s deception.
Today, as she turned empty-handed from the window, she very nearly ran into Danny Pereira, who blushed as he greeted her. “Miss Caroline!” he said. “I didn’t expect to see you here.”
She had her fib ready. “Letters come to Miss Mary on Tradd Street,” she said. “I collect them and take them to Ambrose to send to her.” She felt a pang, remembering the days when Ambrose brought the day’s mail into the parlor on a silver tray. She had never known if Ambrose could read. She tossed her head and said lightly, “What about you? Don’t you have a little messenger boy to fetch your letters?”
He laughed as though she had said something clever. “Of course we do. But Uncle Thomas asked me to write out the bills this month, and I decided to mail them, too.”
“He must trust you a great deal.” It was a pleasure to take a teasing, flattering tone. A belle’s tone.
“I believe he does. But he also knows that I write a better hand than the other men who work for him.”
She looked at the sheaf of bills that attested to the health of Uncle Thomas’s business. “Your hand must ache.”
He laughed again. “No worse than if I cut out a suit.”
“A tailor’s woes,” she said, smiling. If she had a letter in her hand, she could hold it like a fan.
“After I give these to the postmaster, may I walk with you?” he asked.
Now she smiled, not coquetting but in earnest. “Yes.”
Even though she joined the Bennetts at church and Sunday dinner, and she had gone to the shop, Uncle Thomas and Aunt Maria both made an effort to keep Danny at arm’s length from her. It was mischievous of her to see him and speak to him without the hovering interference of the Bennetts. So she was doubly glad of it.
He asked, “Where are you bound?”
“Back to Tradd Street. I have shirts to sew! Three dollars to earn!”
He said, “I’m very glad that Uncle Thomas was persuaded to employ you.”
“So am I,” she said, meeting those changeable eyes. They were brown today and luminous, as though a light glowed behind them.
He said, “I wish we had the opportunity for conversation.”
“So do I.”
“I know I’m not welcome on Tradd Street.”
She halted. “Sophy would welcome you.”
“But your mother would not!” he said, sobered by the thought.
She put her hand on his arm. Even though the day was warm, he wore a wool suit. Always the tailor, always thinking of his uncle’s business. “There must be a way,” she said, encouraging him. Was that angling?
He blushed again. “Oh, there is,” he said.
She let her hand rest on his arm. “How?”
“Come to the shop at our quiet hour,” he said. “Uncle Thomas takes his dinner at two, as his custom does.”
When Caro made her next visit, finished shirts in hand, she arrived at two in the afternoon. As Danny had promised, the shop was empty, save for himself, and his businesslike look dissolved into a look of pleasure when she opened the door.
She laid her bundle on the counter. “Has Uncle Thomas left you in his stead?” she asked, teasing.
“Yes,” he teased back, “since this is the hour we’re least likely to do any business.”
“I thought he trusted you to write out the bills.”
“But not to flatter the grandees of Charleston. Not yet.” He said, “I need more practice in flattery. I want to call on your mother.”
Caro said, “Oh, she can be flattered. But she can be steely, too. She’s more like your mother than she would ever admit.”
“And yet they hate each other so much.”
Caro sighed. “Do you know the story?”
“No, only that they’re bitter. It seems strange that they would feel it and keep it alive after twenty years.”
“Your mother told me.” She relayed it to him: Samuel Bennett’s preference and his decision to free one daughter and not the other.
“How wrong,” he said. “How unfair.”
“Fairness doesn’t enter into it,” she said, trying to keep the family bitterness from her voice.
“It’s their quarrel, not ours,” he said. He put his hands on the counter, close to her own.
“Do you think so?” she asked.
“I believe so with all my heart,” he said, his eyes shining.
“Then we’ll start afresh, the two of us.”
He touched her hand with his fingertip. It felt as gentle as a butterfly alighting. “We will.” He said, “Let me take the finished work. I have the new batch in back.”
He returned with the next week’s work and laid it on the counter. He had no knotted scrap in his hand. She asked, “The wage?”
He said, “Hold out your hands.”
Puzzled, she did so, and he pulled the coins from his pocket. He counted them out, twelve silver quarters, and when she curled her hands over them, to keep them safe, he curled his hands over hers. He blushed, and as she met his eyes, she blushed too. He asked, “Will you come again? At this quiet hour?”
“Yes,” she said, happiness singing in her ears.
Caro spent the week sewing with eagerness in her heart. She hadn’t realized she was smiling as she worked in the kitchen. As she bundled the finished shirts to take to the shop, her mother and Sophy had noticed it. Her mother said, “You’ve been smiling as you work. Singing, too. It’s that boy, Danny.”
Caro tried to hide her emotion. “No, it’s the money. So glad to earn a living!” She thought of Danny pressing the money into her hands and blushed.
Kitty was sharp. “I don’t like that you work for Thomas,” she said.
It was a jab, as they both knew. Her mother wore a pretty new dress, which fit her and suited her because Caro had spent some of her hard-earned money on a length of cloth for her mother. Her mother had been listless and tired—she was sick over the winter, and her cough had lingered—but she brightened at the sight of the cloth. As Caro sewed to make a living, Kitty busied herself with cutting out a dress for herself and sewing it together.
Her mother’s mood irritated her. She resented that Kitty had made no effort to help her. If we both sewed, she thought, we might make six dollars a week. The resentment festered now and spilled over when her mother nagged her working for her uncle.
Caro was equally sharp with her mother. “Should I stop? Do you want to lose the three dollars a week?”
Sophy tried to make peace. “She a good girl,” she said to Kitty. “She work hard and help you. She help all of us.”
But Kitty wouldn’t let it go. “I didn’t like it when you went to Thomas,” she said. “I didn’t like it when he employed you—it’s charity, no matter what he says. I don’t like that you see Maria’s boy every week at the dinner table, and I know you see him at the shop, too.” She gave her daughter a scathing look. “What do you think Danny Pereira wants from you?”
Caro picked up the bundle of finished shirts. “He wants me to sew half a dozen shirts for his uncle,” she said,
with irritation.
“What do you think he will do for you?”
“Give me my wages and another half a dozen shirts,” Caro said, hugging the bundle to her chest.
Kitty said, “You know he can’t marry you.”
“Marry me! All he’s done is pay me the money his uncle owes me.” Suddenly overcome with annoyance, Caro said, “As though I have suitors lined up, and I could say yes or no to any of them as I please! Perhaps I should find a rich planter to see if I can catch his fancy.”
As she clutched the bundle and fled the kitchen, she heard her mother cough.
As before, the shop was quiet. At the sight of her, Danny said softly, “You came back,” in a tone not at all suited for a matter of business.
She thought of all the opposition to her interest in him, and his in her, and said lightly, “I came for my wages!”
He grinned. “But there’s no hurry. Uncle Thomas won’t be back for an hour.”
She set the bundle on the counter. “Does your mother still bedevil you about me?”
“Of course. And yours?”
“Yes. As though I’ll take it to heart if she repeats it often enough.”
Danny said, “We do nothing wrong.” He gestured around the shop as a reminder.
Caro laughed. She said, “Oh, we do. But we do it in plain sight, so we can pretend otherwise.”
He leaned forward. She could smell the pomade he used to restrain the curls in his hair. “Would you defy your mother for me?”
She leaned forward, too, close enough to tease. “I will,” she said.
He started and stood back. Blushing, he said, “I thought I heard a hand on the door.”
He hadn’t. The bell would jangle if anyone turned the knob. She thought, I startled him. Or he startled himself. She stood upright, her hands resting lightly on the counter, as any customer’s might. She asked, “Does your work for Uncle Thomas leave you time to read?”
“A little. When the debating society met, I had the opportunity to read more. They had a fine library.”
“The Clionian Debating Society?”
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