by John Jakes
For supper Judith had prepared a delicious oyster pie with a crackling crust—the oysters came right from the beds in the harbor—but Billy wasn’t hungry. Brett seemed distracted, fussy. Conversation flagged. Judith was serving silver goblets of strawberry ice when bells began to peal.
Cooper frowned. “Saint Michael’s. The telegraph must have brought the first returns from the North.”
“Is it true that tomorrow is an unofficial holiday?” Judith asked.
“It’s true. On the way home I bumped into Bob Rhett. He was jubilant. He said today marked the start of the American revolution of 1860.” Cooper grimaced.
They heard band music. “I’d like to see what’s going on,” Billy said. “Army blue may not be popular or even healthy in a week or two. Would you feel uneasy to be outside, Brett?”
She shook her head. Soon she and Billy were strolling down Meeting toward the Battery. Cooper and Judith had stayed home.
The street was exceptionally busy for early evening, the crowds turbulent though generally good-natured. Billy did notice several scowls, provoked, he assumed, by his uniform. Brett caught her breath in surprise.
“They’re playing the ‘Marseillaise’!”
“They’re crazy,” was his curt reply. A thudding report and a glare of light from the Battery brought him up short. Cannon fire?
Then he relaxed. It was only a salute, not a signal of hostilities. Lord, he was getting as jumpy as a frog on a hot stove.
As they crossed Water Street, Brett pointed. “Do you know those men? They’re watching us.”
“No,” Billy replied, “I don’t think I—wait. I recognize one of them. A loafer I ran into when I tied up at the Battery this afternoon.”
That man, the runty fellow with the eye patch, waved to the others to follow him across Meeting Street. His voice carried as he said, “Let’s talk to that young lady. I’d like to know why she’s hanging around with a damn Yankee.”
“We better tell her it’s unpatriotic,” said another.
“Persuade her,” said a third, scooping a stone out of the street.
Billy counted seven in the group. Four or five had picked up rocks. “Stand behind me,” he said quietly to Brett.
“But surely we’re in no danger on a public thoroughfare—”
The band of men reached the sidewalk. People hurrying toward the Battery flowed past Billy and Brett, paying no attention to them. The man with the eye patch snatched off his filthy cap, hunched his shoulders, and made a great show of pretending to plead.
“Begging your pardon, miss, but the patriotic citizens of Charleston respectfully request that you don’t soil yourself by associatin’ with vermin from the fort.”
Thud, another cannon salute went off. Red light flickered over the buildings along the street.
“You can go to the devil,” Brett said. “I’ll associate with whomever I please.”
“Oh, yes? We’ll see about that.”
Eye Patch sidled forward. Billy pulled his Colt and cocked it. Once again it was a bluff; with so many people passing in carriages and on foot, he didn’t dare fire. Behind him a woman spied the gun and let out a soft shriek. Several pedestrians rushed into the street to avoid trouble.
Eye Patch feinted for Billy’s gun hand. Billy dodged away. Another man flung a rock. It flew past Billy and struck Brett’s shoulder; she cried out. Billy swore, jumped forward, and laid the Colt barrel across the rock thrower’s cheek. The man howled and danced backward, bleeding.
Billy looked around warily. The men were forming a semicircle, closing in. He didn’t want to risk a brawl in which Brett might be seriously hurt. With reluctance, he shouted a word that ran counter to everything in his training and character:
“Run!”
Brett hesitated. He grabbed her arm and practically dragged her away toward Tradd Street. Like wolves after prey, Eye Patch and his friends pursued. Rocks flew. One hit Billy’s neck and broke the skin.
At the corner of Meeting and Tradd, Eye Patch shouted for his gang to halt; Billy was already guiding Brett through the gate at Cooper’s. Panting, they shut the gate and leaned against the wall of the entrance passage. Thud and thud, a second cannon on the Battery joined the first.
“I’ve never run from anyone or anything before,” Billy gasped.
“It was”—like him, she was struggling for breath—“the only thing to do. I can’t imagine people from South Carolina behaving that way.”
He took her hand and led her to the stairs. He hadn’t realized how far the hatred had spread or how deeply it ran. No wonder old Gardner disliked his post and Doubleday fired his howitzer as a warning. Charleston was out of control.
Next day, as Lincoln’s victory in the popular voting became certain, the celebration intensified. When the lighter from Fort Moultrie arrived, an excited crowd refused to permit the small arms and ammunition to be loaded—exactly as the arsenal officer had predicted.
By evening there was jubilation throughout the city. Bands blared. Lamps and candles glowed in almost every house window. Groups of revelers, some sober, some not, roistered past Huntoon’s home on East Battery.
He and Ashton were preparing to leave for the fireworks display on the Battery. Huntoon had found an old blue satin cockade, the symbol of resistance ever since Nullification days. He fastened it to his best beaver hat. Ashton stood before the glass and adjusted her bonnet with black and white feathers on it. Secession bonnets, the ladies called them. They were all the fashion.
“Are they really planning a special convention?” she asked.
“Absolutely. The legislature called it for the seventeenth of December, expressly to determine the state’s future relationship with the North. It’s coming, my darling.” He took hold of her waist and whirled her around. “Independence. In Washington, Senator Chestnut resigned today. Senator Hammond, too.”
Their impromptu celebration was interrupted by the appearance of a house boy.
“Gen’man to see you, Mist’ Huntoon.”
“Damn you, Rex, I can’t see anyone now.”
“He say it’s important.”
“What’s his name?”
“Mist’ Cam’ron Plummer.”
“Oh. “ Huntoon’s truculence faded immediately. “Send him to the side door.”
The slave left. Huntoon and his wife exchanged sober looks. Then he slipped out of the room.
In the shadows at the side entrance, a man whispered, “I did the best I could, Mr. Huntoon. Did exactly what you asked. Kept watch till they showed up on the street, then went after ’em. But before we could roust ’em good, they turned tail and ran to the house on Tradd Street. I still got to pay my lads, though. We all done the best we could.”
“I know, I know—keep your voice down.”
Huntoon wasn’t surprised that the scheme had come to nothing. The idea had been Ashton’s, and he had opposed it. She had wept and raved until he relented. Her threat to sleep in a separate room for a month also had something to do with his decision.
But, after giving in, he had regretted it. A man with his ambitions couldn’t afford foolish risks. In the future Ashton could indulge her vindictive nature if she wished, but he would refuse to become involved. To that he made up his mind as he began to count coins into the hand of the man with the eye patch.
55
ORRY PUSHED HIS PLATE away. Cuffey stepped forward.
“Something wrong, Mist’ Orry?”
“Tell the kitchen the beef is bad.”
Cuffey brought the plate near his nose, sniffed, made a face. “Sure enough will. You want something else?”
He shook his head. “Is yours bad, Cooper?”
“Yes. I didn’t want to say anything. I was just going to leave it.”
Coffey hurried out with the plates. Orry slouched in his chair. Autumn rain pelted the closed shutters of the dining room.
“Something’s wrong in the smokehouse again,” Orry said with a sigh. “Dampness getting in.
I tell you, I never realized how much I depended on Brett until she left.”
Cooper knew what his brother meant. The signs were small but they were unmistakable. Mont Royal’s shutters were bleached pale as bone by the weather; they needed a fresh coat of oil and pigment. Expensive flocked wallpaper was peeling away in the guest bedroom. Clusters of dust gathered in corners. On his last visit he had been informed that Cuffey’s Anne had delivered twin girls, but one of the infants had died because there were complications. No one had sent for Aunt Belle Nin.
Cooper tried to lighten the mood. “Well, you’ll just have to marry one of those ladies of your acquaintance and give her a broom and a paintbrush for a wedding present.”
“There isn’t a one of them fit to set foot on this plantation.”
The brusque reply startled Cooper and confirmed something Brett had told him. She said Orry no longer smiled, that his mind seemed to have taken a turn into somber regions familiar only to himself. Cooper believed it. He decided he had better get on to the purpose of his visit: “Well, I wish you were interested in someone. I don’t believe Brett will be coming back.”
“Because of Billy.”
“That’s right.”
“Are you trying to tell me they’re married?”
Cooper shook his head. “They’re still delaying, although Billy is upset about that. Brett continues to wait out of consideration for you.”
Orry uttered a scornful grunt and reached for the cut-glass decanter of whiskey. It had become a fixture on the table, Cooper noticed.
“She needn’t wait on my account.” Orry poured whiskey into the long-stemmed glass from which he had already drunk a large quantity of white Bordeaux. “I don’t plan to change my mind in the foreseeable future.”
Cooper leaned forward. “Don’t you think you should?”
“Did she send you up from Charleston to say that?”
“She did not. Damn it. Orry”—he thumped the table—“despite the behavior of the LaMottes and some of our other neighbors, we are not living in the Middle Ages. Women are entitled to run their own lives. Please permit Brett to run hers—regardless of the risks you see or imagine. She’s trying to keep peace in the family—which is more than I would do in her position.”
“The answer is still no.”
His resolution was wavering, though. He had thought about Brett’s situation a lot lately. He knew Cooper was right and that he should grant the permission. Yet he wasn’t quite able to do it. The news from Washington, Charleston, everywhere, was too threatening.
Cooper folded his napkin. He pinched the fold between thumb and forefinger. “Very well. Cuffey, would you kindly tell my driver to bring my carriage up immediately?”
“I thought you were spending the night,” Orry said.
“What’s the use? My view of the future is as dim as yours, but at that point we part company. Life is chiefly trouble and always has been. Brett deserves to live to the full while she can. You’re standing in the way and apparently plan to continue. I regret that, but there seems to be nothing I can do about it. I’ll look in on Mother and then go. Excuse me.”
Stiff and unsmiling, he left the room.
Orry sat listening to the rain. Now Cooper had turned against him too. A moment ago he’d been wavering on the matter of Brett’s marriage. But this latest rebuff stoked his anger and hardened his will.
He noticed there was no more whiskey in his glass. When had he drunk it? He couldn’t remember. He stretched out his arm and closed his hand around the neck of the decanter.
“Look at that fog,” Judith murmured. “I hope Cooper doesn’t stay away half the night. I think he’s getting sick.”
Brett glanced up from the knitting needles whose operation she had been demonstrating to eight-year-old Marie-Louise. “Why did he go back to the yard? Is anyone working?”
“No. He went because he’s upset. The ship’s far behind schedule. His chief architect quit and returned to Brooklyn because he couldn’t get along with the local workmen. Now the banks are hesitant about extending more credit in case commercial ties with the North are cut. Oh, it’s such a dreadful mess.”
She could have added that Cooper had also taken on the burden of Brett’s problem. She didn’t because it would only have produced guilt feelings, and Brett felt bad enough already.
Judith was desperately concerned about her husband. Last week he had come back from Mont Royal at four-thirty in the morning. Since then he had spent each day at the yard on James Island, and returned there every evening after supper. He kept a boatman on call at all hours. The man was beginning to complain.
But at least the boatman had his health. Cooper had lost eleven pounds—a substantial drop for someone of his slender build. Lately his face had a waxy look. While Brett laughed and murmured with Marie-Louise, Judith watched the fog coiling slowly past the moisture-speckled window. On a night like this what could Cooper possibly do at the yard?
She knew. He could destroy himself with worry.
The great keelson of the Star of Carolina bulked in the fog like the backbone of some prehistoric beast that had perished and rotted, leaving only this. Cooper turned away from it. The ship was a dying dream. He had at last admitted that to himself. But the dream had left tangible wreckage. What should he do now?
He plucked out a handkerchief, blew his dripping nose, and wiped it several times. He was getting sick. He didn’t care.
Distantly, in the main ship channel, a steamer horn sounded at short intervals. The fog hung thick over James Island. Cooper would have been lost in it had it not been for the light of two lanterns hanging under the eaves of the shedlike office building. The lantern light diffused in great fan-shaped rays.
I might have pulled it off if Van Roon hadn’t quit, he thought as he trudged through deep mud that seeped over his shoe tops and soaked his stockings. Van Roon, the architect, was the linchpin of the project. He had gotten into a fistfight with a poor clod hired to carry buckets of rivets.
A man of education and restraint, Van Roon had punched and cursed like a dockhand. Over what? The question of who would own the Federal property in Charleston—the armory, the forts—if the state declared its independence. Half a dozen of the workers had been taking turns at Van Roon before Cooper rushed in to break up the brawl.
Hopeless.
He reached the water’s edge and peered toward the ship channel, imagining the pentagonal fort standing on its shoal out there. Sumter had been started during the winter of eighteen-twenty-eight—twenty-nine and never finished. To this day it remained unoccupied. But its proximity to the channel and the harbor mouth made it strategically important—perhaps more important than any other Charleston fort. What if old Gardner moved to fortify it? The sparks would fly then.
Fools were in control of the state Cooper loved so much. Fools and opportunists like Ashton’s husband. They shouted their slogans, spouted their gaseous oratory, and forgot or ignored the manufactories of the North, the great industrial installations such as Hazard’s. In all the South there was but a single ironworks of size, the Tredegar in Richmond. If war came, how would the South fight it? With gallant pronouncements and a barrage of cotton bolls?
What would happen in the next few months? Staring into the fog, Cooper felt he knew the answer.
“Apocalypse,” he said half aloud, and then sneezed so hard his hat fell off.
The hat plopped into the water and floated out of reach. He waded in after it, but it kept bobbing away from him. He gave up the chase when the water rose to his thighs.
How marvelous, he thought with a chuckle. The Almighty pricks your pretensions by blowing your hat away.
Or was it a kind of warning? A warning that in the almost certain apocalypse, survival would be first and foremost a matter of small things? Practical things: Food. Shelter. A hat for the storm.
He sloshed back to shore and hurried to the office, caught by an inspiration: since no respectable naval architect could be lured to
Charleston in these times, he would become the architect.
He pulled down engineering drawings hanging in wall racks. Flung the drawings on the big worktable. Turned the hanging lamp up to full.
He studied the drawings, then pulled down more, until the table was heaped with them. He scribbled calculations and questions. But he was finally forced to admit the truth. He knew a little about many aspects of the project, but not enough. His decision to do the architect’s job represented the only means of saving the Star of Carolina. But it was, at the same time, hopeless.
At dawn the yawning boatman found Cooper slumped over the table unconscious and afire with fever.
“Bring that barrow over here. You people will have to step aside.”
Billy’s first command was directed to a civilian workman, his second to sightseers wandering on the dune near Fort Moultrie. The repair work was always hampered by local residents or vacationers who came to gawk. Billy frequently lost his temper with them.
Today was no exception. He ordered a family to pick up its picnic hampers and move off the dune his men were reducing so that snipers couldn’t occupy it. The weather had turned hot again, unusual for November. Sweat ran so freely that he’d tied a red bandanna around his head to keep it out of his eyes.
He saw Captain Foster coming from the fort, motioning. He left the workmen and walked quickly toward his superior. Foster noticed that Billy was once again working barefoot. He disapproved but said nothing this morning; he had something else on his mind.
“Gardner’s been relieved. We’re getting a new commander.”
“Who is it?”
“Major Robert Anderson.”
“My brother knew a Robert Anderson in Mexico. An artillerist. He graduated from the Academy a few years ahead of Lee.”
“That’s the man. He’s a Kentuckian. He’s owned slaves. I suppose the secretary picked him to appease the local folk.”
The decision was understandable. Gardner’s attempt to transfer arms and ammunition from the arsenal had produced a statewide storm of criticism.
But a slave owner in charge of the Charleston forts? Billy didn’t think it a very good omen.
