Charleston's Daughter

by Sabra Waldfogel

  “No,” Bel said, unable to disguise her pleasure in it.

  “How will I be able to leave the house?”

  “You won’t,” Bel said. With Caro’s clothes in her arms, she left the room, pulling the door tightly shut behind her.

  Caro heard the key turning in the lock. She went to the door to discover that it locked from outside. She sat on the bed, her hands knotted in her lap, to wait for whatever Cressy had planned for her.

  Susan had fibbed to Emily. After the upholsterer, they visited the carpet merchant and the home furnisher, where Susan looked at mirrors for the foyer until Emily said, “Mother, my back aches. I have to sit down.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Just tired.”

  “Only a little longer, Emily,” Susan said, as she surveyed the mirrors again, badgering the clerk to measure each one until Emily thought she would burst into tears with boredom and fatigue.

  When she was satisfied, Susan took Emily by the arm. “You do look tired, chick.”

  I’m not a little girl, Emily thought. She sank into the carriage with relief and said nothing on the way back to King Street.

  When they returned, Susan leaned forward to call to Henry, “Bring us around the front.” She said to Emily, “I want to look at the spot where the mirror should hang. I’m still not sure about the mirror.”

  Since it was unusual for them to use the front door, Susan had to rap as though they were visitors. They waited, and Susan said impatiently, “You see why we need a proper servant to open the door.”

  Emily nodded wearily.

  The door was opened by a tall, slender figure in the neat gray and dazzling apron of a parlor maid. Under the white kerchief was an ivory-skinned face. A face much too sad to be an obedient slave’s. A very familiar face.

  Caroline’s face.

  Emily cried out, “Mother, what have you done?”

  Emily knew to wait until late afternoon, after dinner, when aristocratic Charleston slept and slave Charleston labored. She slipped into the kitchen, where Dulcie washed the dinner dishes. “Where is she?” Emily asked. “Where is Caro?”

  Dulcie shook her head.

  “Tell me, Dulcie,” Emily pleaded.

  “Don’t make it worse, Miss Emily,” Dulcie whispered.

  Emily ran from the kitchen. She bolted down the driveway and out the gate. It was too hot to hurry, and by the time she arrived at Tradd Street, she was sweating and panting as no lady should.

  Sophy ran to the gate. “I thought you was Caro. Where is she?”

  “At King Street.”

  “He take her?”

  The will be damned. “To keep her in the house.”

  Sophy sagged in relief. “She work in the house? That ain’t the worst news I ever heard.”

  Emily said, “Where they can mistreat her, and punish her, and send her to the Work House.”

  Sophy said grimly, “Come with me.”

  Kitty sat at the kitchen table, her cheeks even more hollow than usual, her eyes even more shadowed. At the sight of Emily, she sprang up. “Where is she? How is she?”

  “My father has taken her into the house as a servant. He won’t let her leave.”

  “Why didn’t he tell me?”

  “As though he would,” Emily cried out.

  Kitty’s eyes were fever-bright. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  Emily wanted to burst into tears. “He threatened to sell her if I warned you,” she said.

  “I’ll go to him! I’ll speak to him. I’ll get her back.”

  Sophy put her hand on Kitty’s arm. “Kitty, wait,” she said.

  Kitty shrugged off Sophy’s touch. She said to Emily, “Now. We’ll go now.”

  Sophy entreated her. “We sit down, we talk, we think of something. How to get round him. Don’t rush off in a frenzy. It don’t go well for you.”

  Kitty said, “I don’t care much for myself. But I’d do anything for Caro.”

  Emily held out her arm. “Lean on me.”

  Sophy watched. Emily flushed under Sophy’s scrutiny. In a world arranged differently, Kitty would be her aunt.

  They hastened down the driveway, Kitty and Emily together, and at the gate, Kitty halted, her hand over her chest, her breath coming in short rasps. “Give me a moment,” she said, trying to regain her strength.

  “You aren’t well.”

  She breathed more deeply and stood up straight. “It doesn’t matter,” she said.

  At King Street, Kitty said to Ambrose, “Tell Mr. Lawrence Jarvie that I’m here to see him.” When Ambrose hesitated, Kitty said, “Go on. Do it!” Ambrose shook his head, but he obeyed his former mistress. In a moment he returned and ushered both of them into the study.

  Lawrence looked up from his desk. At the sight of Kitty his tone was irate. “What is this? Why are you here?”

  Without raising her voice, Kitty said, “I’ve come for my daughter. Where is she?”

  “Emily, take this woman away, or I’ll have Ambrose throw her out.”

  “How could you do this? Take her without asking me?”

  “You? What do I owe you?”

  Kitty said, “James didn’t want this for her. You know that.”

  “James left her in my care,” Lawrence said acidly. “And you as well, if you recall.”

  Kitty stood very still. Her voice was calm and cold. “You defile his memory by doing this,” she said.

  Her father flushed, as he had when the will was read. “Get out,” he said to Kitty.

  “Not without my daughter.”

  “Get out, or I’ll have the Guard throw you out.”

  From the corner of her eye, Emily saw the movement of a shadow. A gray shadow.

  “Caro!” Kitty cried. “Caro, is that you?”

  Lawrence rose. Full of fury, he said, “Get out now.”

  A muffled cry came from the hallway where the gray shadow waited.

  Kitty flew at him. He lunged forward to seize her hands. She pulled them away and slapped his face as hard as she could.

  He clutched her wrist and said icily, “Strike your master, will you? You’ll go to the Work House for that.”

  Kitty sagged in his grasp. In disgust, he let her go as she bent double with a wracking cough.

  “Ambrose!” Lawrence called into the hallway.

  Emily darted between the two of them, trying to shield Kitty. She put her arm around the stricken woman’s shoulders.

  “You get out of this,” her father said.

  Emily said, “Papa, not the Work House. Can’t you see that she’s ill?”

  Lawrence yanked Emily by the hand so hard that she felt it in her shoulder and said, “That’s enough.” He called, “Ambrose!”

  Ambrose appeared in the doorway. “Yes, Massa?”

  “Take this woman away, Ambrose. Send for the Guard. Have them take her to the Work House.”

  Ambrose’s pleasant face went gray. “Massa, please,” he said quietly.

  “Do you defy me, too?”

  “No, Massa,” Ambrose said.

  “Then do as I say.”

  Ambrose reached for Kitty, who was now sobbing as well as coughing. Between coughs, she pleaded, “Caro. Oh, Caro.”

  From the hallway, Caro watched, her eyes wide, her hand over her mouth, and Emily felt their shared anguish resonate between them.

  Chapter 13: The Purloined Letter

  As she sat at her desk, Emily held Joshua’s latest letter in her hand, reading the Cincinnati address as though it were a talisman. She hefted the letter, knowing that he had enclosed a clipping as well as a bank draft. His own words would give her hope, but she wanted to prolong her anticipation.

  Caro was in the house, and she had been enslaved in a way that brought tears to Emily’s eyes. Slavery’s worst was no longer far away, in the Work House and the Slave Mart. It was in this house, too. It was incised in the flesh of a work-worn, heartbroken gir
l and engraved in the soul of a planter’s daughter who could do nothing for her.

  Emily sliced open the letter and unfolded the pages. Hearth and Home patronized a bank that adorned its notes with its own imposing building on one side and Lady Liberty on the other. Emily was fiercely glad of the freedom in the inscription: Six dollars payable to Emily Jarvie. She had more than a hundred dollars in the Bank of Charleston now, all of it gained by her own hand.

  Joshua hadn’t sent her a clipping of her own piece from Hearth and Home; instead he had enclosed the front page of the Liberator, William Garrison’s great jeremiad against slavery. Charleston had a particular hatred for the Liberator. She had heard her father reminisce about the day in 1835, a generation ago, when Charleston’s postmaster censored the Liberator by removing it from the post and making a bonfire of the issues in the street.

  A page from the Liberator was an incendiary thing. She flushed, proud of Joshua’s zeal and angry that he would take such a risk.

  Confined to the house and the yard, Caro could no longer fetch the letters. Emily had asked Sophy to retrieve them from the post office. The first time that Emily came to ask for a letter, Sophy didn’t unlock the gate. The ironwork was open and lacy, and Emily realized—she had never seen it before—that it was adorned with the symbol of welcome, the pineapple. Emily asked, “Sophy, is there a letter?”

  Sophy shook her head. She asked, “How is Caro?”

  “We don’t speak. My mother forbids it.” Tears rose to her eyes. “But she looks dreadful.”

  “What about her mama? Any word?”

  “Just that she went to the Work House.” The tears trickled from her eyes, and she wiped them, in the most unladylike fashion, with her gloved fist.

  Sophy said nothing. To Emily, her silence seemed to speak. Ain’t you ashamed? Don’t it burn your soul? You have to answer for it.

  Now the gentle tap on the door, and the low voice, brought her back to her room and her desk. “Miss Emily?”

  Emily swept the letter into her lap as Lydia stepped into the doorway. “Yes, Lydia?”

  “Come to fetch your mending, miss.”

  She forced a benevolent tone. “Later, Lydia.”

  “Yes, miss.”

  “Close the door after you.”

  “Yes, miss.” She closed it softly. Lydia did everything softly.

  Emily’s heart stopped pounding. She recovered the letter from her lap and smoothed the pages that held the words Joshua had written.

  He wrote as he spoke. Even on the page, the words had a northern cadence, a swiftness that no southerner could muster. It had been dreadfully cold in Ohio, he said, with snow that lingered on the streets. He was glad of his heavy wool coat. He wrote about the business of Hearth and Home. Circulation had increased, and they had several new advertisers, which pleased his publisher. We may catch up to Godey’s yet, he wrote, and Emily heard the joke in his rueful tone. A cat had strayed into his boardinghouse, to his landlady’s dismay, and now every boarder, no matter how hard-bitten, fussed over Puss; there was no thought of the cat’s removal to the alley. He told her what he had been reading: Walt Whitman’s poems, Leaves of Grass. He wrote, I doubt that a bookseller would order it for a southern girl. It’s thought of as scandalous, even in freethinking Ohio.

  As she read, she thought of how she yearned for the life he wrote about—the snow, the cat by the boardinghouse hearth, the business of literature, the booksellers who would sell any book to anyone. On the page, Ohio seemed more tangible than Charleston, and Charleston, for all the vigor of its beauty and its ugliness, seemed like the dream.

  She shook her head. She was too much the writer. She was hearing voices and seeing ghosts.

  She read:

  My dearest Emily, I think every day of the promise we made to each other on the Battery, and I swear to be steadfast in it. I miss you greatly. Someday we will be free to speak the truth and stand beside each other. I yearn to take your hands, and I long to kiss your lips. I remain, as always, with greatest affection, your Joshua.

  With a start, she thought, He writes as though we’re engaged. The thought spread a sanguine warmth through her body. She caressed the page as though it were a man’s bearded cheek. Smiling, she folded everything decorously together and put it back into the envelope.

  “Emily?” her stepmother called.

  She stuffed the letter in her pocket, and not a moment too soon because Susan was prone to open the door without asking. When her stepmother hurried into the room, Emily was innocently seated at her desk, her pen poised over a sheet of letter paper.

  Susan was smiling. “Emily, put that away. You have a visitor.”

  Emily looked up, letting herself smile brightly in return. “Don’t tease me, Mother. Who is it?”

  “It’s Mr. Ellison, come from Sumter County.”

  Since her return to Charleston last fall, Emily had written several polite notes to Mr. Ellison. She had always reminded him that she hadn’t forgotten his proposal but wasn’t yet ready to reply.

  She hoped, with all her soul, that he was still kind enough not to press her.

  He rose at the sight of her and turned his ruddy face, the clean-shaven skin a little chapped from the air of the upcountry, toward her. She was always surprised by the color of his eyes, a cerulean beauty in his otherwise plain face. He grinned as he pressed her hand.

  She settled on the sofa, one of her stepmother’s stylish new things, upholstered in a slippery satin, and Susan sat beside her. Even on this big piece of furniture, their skirts, enlarged by hoops, touched each other.

  Emily asked, “Mr. Ellison, what brings you to Charleston?”

  “Oh, some business,” he said. Then he grinned. “And the races,” he said, happy at the thought of horses. “Even though it ain’t the season for them.”

  “Of course. Since you’re a horseman. Are you racing your own? Your black beauty?”

  Her stepmother smiled as she listened to the arch tone and the familiarity.

  “No,” he said. “I don’t want to risk her racing. But I don’t mind taking a flutter on another man’s nags.”

  “Gambling, Mr. Ellison?”

  “That’s what the races are for, ain’t they, Miss Emily? A little wagering, a little drinking, and maybe, if I’m lucky afterward, a little dancing, too.” As during the season. “Will you dance with me again, Miss Emily?”

  Was it disloyal to flirt with John Ellison when her heart was so full of Joshua Aiken? It was absurdly easy, as though she were in a theatrical, as she had been as a girl at Madame Devereaux’s. “If I have the chance? Of course I will, Mr. Ellison.”

  “And that other matter, Miss Emily? The one we discussed last summer? Have you had enough time to think it over?”

  “Just a little longer.”

  He leaned forward, smiling, but she felt faint at the pressure in it. “Don’t make a man wait forever, Miss Emily. That ain’t right, either.”

  Her stepmother said, “Mr. Ellison, is this what I think it is?”

  “Miss Susan, last summer I asked Emily to be my wife.”

  Susan said, “Emily, you never said a word!”

  “I wanted to give it the most careful consideration, Mother. I asked him to allow me—”

  “You’ve been as good as engaged for months, and you’ve never said a thing.”

  John Ellison’s patience had run out, and the pressure felt like a vise on either side of her head. “Mother, please, don’t misunderstand me. Don’t misunderstand us.”

  Grinning again, Ellison said, “Miss Susan, if you could help her to see to say yes, I’d be the happiest man in South Carolina.”

  Susan said, “My husband should know about this.” She shot Emily a chiding glance. “But I doubt he’d say no to it.”

  “When you talk to him, let him know that I hope to make her the happiest woman in South Carolina,” Ellison said.

  Emily stared down at her lap. Entrapped
by her own subterfuge! She raised her head and stammered, “Mother, please. Surely it depends on me? Surely it can hold a bit? It’s too important a decision to hurry.”

  Susan took Emily’s hand and pressed it, too hard. “Don’t disappoint us, Emily,” she said, her voice as unforgiving as her hands.

  Monday was wash day, and Caro stood over the wash table, sorting the soiled laundry as Sophy had taught her: cottons in one pile, woolens in another, white cloth and colored cloth separate. Susan Jarvie had taken Caro into the house for her looks, but Cressy was the taskmistress who meted out her work and cuffed and threatened her if she wasn’t satisfied. Cressy took a dim view of keeping a pretty face to open the door when the floors needed sweeping, the rooms needed dusting, the hearths needed cleaning and blacking, the carpets needed beating, and the silver needed polishing. She set Caro to work in the kitchen, and she relegated the wash to Caro, too.

  Caro sighed as she checked every garment with pockets. Sophy had told her that you never knew what might be lurking in a pocket. The ink on a letter could ruin a whole washtub of white cottons.

  Bel sat at the kitchen table, peeling potatoes. Dulcie was at the City Market, and the two of them were alone in the kitchen.

  Caro worked slowly. She had little enthusiasm for this task now that she was no longer paid for it. It was strange that the promise of money would make it possible to bear something otherwise so distasteful. She reached for a plain cotton dress that belonged to Emily. In the pocket, she felt the thick paper of the envelope and slipped the letter into her own pocket.

  Bel, who had one eye on her potatoes and the other on Caro, saw her do it. “What was that?”

  “A letter that belongs to Miss Emily.”

  Bel held out her hand. “Give it to me.”

  Trying to keep her temper, Caro said, “Let me give it to Lydia, and she can take it up to Miss Emily’s room.”

  “I take it.”

  “Why?” Caro asked. “What do you want with it?”

  “Give it to me,” Bel said, her temper rising. “Hand it over, Miss High and Mighty.”