by John Jakes
“That’s true, Mr. Brown,” Brett responded. It was not said unkindly, but it produced an angry glance from the visitor. Tired all at once, Constance realized she had overlooked a potential problem here. Brown couldn’t be expected to like Southerners any more than a South Carolina native could readily accept a black at the dinner table.
Up early, she drove alone to the shed, arriving simultaneously with Abraham Fouts and his crew of four. Fouts and a second man suppressed smirks at the sight of big, crude letters someone had slashed onto the side of the shed with black paint: WE ARE FOR THE WAR BUT WE AINT FOR THE NIGGER.
Saddened and angry, Constance hoisted her skirts and stormed to the wall. She rubbed her thumb across the last letters as if to wipe them out. They were dry. “Mr. Fouts, please paint over this obscenity till it can’t be seen. If the message or anything like it appears again, you will do the same thing, and keep doing it until the nastiness stops or this building collapses under a hundred coats of whitewash.”
The pale man poked nervously at his upper lip. “They’s a lot of talk about this place among the men, Miz Hazard. They say it’s gonna be some kind of home for nigger babies. They don’t like that.”
“What they like is immaterial to me. My husband owns this property, and I’ll do whatever I please with it.”
Goaded by glances from the others, Fouts stuck out his chin. “Your husband, he might not—”
“My husband knows and approves of what I plan to do. If you care to keep working for Hazard’s, get busy.”
Fouts dug a toe in the dirt, but another man was bolder. “We ain’t ’customed to takin’ orders from a female, even if she is the wife of the boss.”
“Fine.” Constance was melting with anger and uncertainty but didn’t dare show it. “I’m sure there are any number of manufactories where it isn’t necessary. Collect your pay from Mr. Wotherspoon.”
The stunned man raised his hand. “Wait a minute, I—”
“You’re done here.” She pointed to the man’s hand, stained between thumb and index finger. “I see you used some black paint last night. How courageous of you to state your views under cover of darkness.” Her voice broke as she took swift steps forward. “Get out of here and collect your pay.”
The man ran. Anxiety replaced her fear; she had certainly exceeded the authority George had granted her. Well, it was too late to worry. Besides, Brown’s shelter would never be secure unless she made sure of it.
“I regret this incident, Mr. Fouts, but I stand fast. Do you want to whitewash the building or quit?” She saw three men with carpenter’s tools trudging up the hill; she would have to ask the same of them.
“I’ll work,” Fouts grumbled. “But for a bunch of nigras? It ain’t right.”
Returning to Belvedere, she tried to purge herself of her rage. The North was no pristine fount of morality—a fact that had infuriated Southerners subjected to abolitionist rhetoric for three decades and more. Fouts no doubt believed with perfect sincerity that the Negro was inferior to the white man; George said Lincoln had been known to express the same view. She could understand that Fouts was a product of the times, comfortable and safe in sharing the opinions of a majority.
But condone those views or join that majority—or let it intimidate her? The devil she would. She was the wife of George Hazard. She was the daughter of Patrick Flynn.
“Abominable,” Virgilia said when Constance told her about the painted message. “If we had proper leadership in Washington, things would be different. I believe they will be soon.”
“Why is that?” Brett asked from across the table laden with a huge lamb roast and five other dishes, comprising the typically gargantuan midday meal. Rosalie, Margaret, and Leander didn’t eat; they devoured. Even Brown couldn’t seem to get enough.
“The President’s a weakling.” Virgilia handed down the pronouncement in much the same tone that had caused so much trouble in the past. “Look at the way he responded to Frémont’s manumission order in Missouri. He cowers and caters to the slave masters of Kentucky and the other border states—”
“He does that for military reasons, I’m told.”
Virgilia paid no attention to Constance. “—but Thad Stevens and some others show signs of wanting to bring him to heel. With the right Republicans in control, Lincoln will get what he richly deserves. So will the rebs.”
“Please excuse me,” Brett said, and left the room.
After the meal, Constance gathered her nerve to speak to Virgilia in private. “I wish you wouldn’t make—pronouncements in front of Brett. You said she extended herself to help you, that she’s responsible for the wonderful change, and—”
“Yes, she helped me, but that has nothing to do with the truth or—” She took a breath, finally comprehending that Constance was furious with her.
Virgilia’s new vision of herself, her increased confidence, had begun to change her perceptions in a number of other ways. Sometimes it was necessary to be tactful with opponents. She forced a sigh. “You’re perfectly right. While I can never abandon my beliefs—”
“No one asks that of you.”
“—I do understand that Brett’s entitled to some deference.”
“Not to mention plain everyday courtesy.”
“Certainly. She’s become part of the family, and, as you say, she was kind to me. I’ll try harder from now on. Still, under the present arrangement, there are bound to be disputes.”
Quietly: “Since you brought up what you call the present arrangement, suppose we discuss it.”
Virgilia nodded. “I know that my grace period here is running out. I’m anxious to leave. Anxious to get back into the stream of things. I don’t know how. Where can I go to earn a livelihood? What can I do when I have no training and very little education in practical things?”
Virgilia slowly walked to the parlor window. A shower was in progress. Rain clung to the glass, casting patterns on her face like new pox scars. In a small, sad voice, she said, “Those are the questions I’ve never had to ask before. To wait for answers that don’t come is frightening, Constance.”
She stared into the rain. Constance thought, Don’t wait—search! But the pique passed, and she again felt pity for George’s sister. Virgilia appeared a changed woman, but did the changes go any deeper than her skin? She began to doubt it.
Two points clarified themselves as a result of the brief conversation. Virgilia had to leave Belvedere before George discovered her presence or Brett, goaded to anger, told him. But she was incapable of finding her way alone, so part of that burden, too, fell on Constance.
39
IN LATE OCTOBER, MRS. Burdetta Halloran of Richmond was a woman distressed.
Two years a childless widow, she was thirty-three, statuesque, with gorgeous auburn hair, a stunning derrière, and breasts that were, in her opinion, merely adequate. But the package had been sufficiently enchanting to captivate the wine merchant who had wed her when she was twenty-one. Sixteen years her senior, Halloran had died of heart failure while struggling to satisfy her strong sexual appetites.
Poor fellow, she had liked him well enough, even though he lacked the technique and stamina to keep her happy physically. He had treated her well, however, and she had only cuckolded him twice: the first liaison had lasted four days, the second a single night. His passing had left her in comfortable circumstances—or she had thought so until this wretched war came.
Today, when the rest of the town was euphoric about a victory at some spot near the Potomac called Ball’s Bluff, she was upset by her tour of retail stores. Prices were climbing. Her pound of bacon had cost fifty cents, her pound of coffee an outrageous dollar and a half. Only last week the freedman who supplied her from the country with stove and firewood had announced that he wanted eight dollars for the next cord, not five. With such inflation, she would not long survive in her accustomed style.
Born a Soames—the family went back four generations in the Old Dominion—she deplored all
the changes in her city, her state, and in the social order. Bob Lee, finest of the fine, was being mocked with the name “Granny” because of his military failures; she had heard he would soon be shipped to one of the benighted military districts of the cotton South.
Queen Varina was outraging members of local society by forming a court made up chiefly of those who were not. Oh, Joe Johnston’s wife belonged, but Burdetta Halloran suspected she did so to advance her husband’s career; she certainly had nothing in common with the rest of the upstarts who surrounded and influenced the First Lady: Mrs. Mallory, a flaming papist; Mrs. Wigfall, a vulgar Texan; Mrs. Chesnut, a Carolina bitch. Beneath contempt, every one. Yet they were favored.
The city was too crowded. Harlots and speculators poured off every arriving train. Hordes of niggers, many undoubtedly fugitives, swelled the mobs of idlers in the streets. Captured Yankees filled the improvised prisons, like Liggon’s Tobacco Factory at Twenty-fifth and Main. Their unprecedented arrogance and contempt for all things Southern outraged solid citizens like Burdetta Halloran, who courageously bore the cross of Jeff Davis and spent every free hour knitting socks and more socks for the troops.
She had stopped knitting two weeks ago, when her distress reached crisis proportions. This afternoon, covertly nipping on whiskey from a flask in a crocheted cozy, she was traveling in a hack to Church Hill. She had been contemplating the visit for days. Sleeplessness and mounting despair had finally pushed her to act.
The hack slowed. She sipped again, then hid the covered flask in her bag. “Shall I wait?” the driver asked after he parked near the corner of Twenty-fourth. Some dismal premonition caused Mrs. Halloran to nod.
She darted along the walk and up the stoop, so nervous she nearly fell. She had drunk the liquor for courage, but it only dulled her mind and sharpened her anxiety. She raised the knocker and let it fall.
Her heart beat hurtfully. The slanting October light foretold winter—sadness and loneliness. God, wasn’t he here? She knocked again, harder and longer.
The door opened six inches. She nearly fainted from happiness. Then she looked more closely at her lover. His hair was uncombed, and a wedge of skin showed between sagging lapels of claret velvet. A dressing gown at this hour?
At first she assumed he was ill. Soon she realized the truth and the extent of her stupidity.
“Burdetta.” There was no surprise and no welcome in the way he said her name. Nor did he open the door wider.
“Lamar, you haven’t answered a single one of my letters.”
“I thought you’d understand the significance of silence.”
“Dear Lord, you don’t mean—-you wouldn’t simply cast me out—not after six months of unbelievable—”
“This is an embarrassment,” he said, his voice lower and hard as his instrument when he took her in various ways, satiating her only after four or five hours. His eyes shunted past her to the curious hackman on his high seat. “For both of us.”
“Who have you got now? Some young slut? Is she inside?” She sniffed. “My God, you have. You must have soaked in her perfume.” Tears filled her eyes. She extended her hand through the opening. “Darling, at least let me come in. Talk this out. If I’ve wronged or offended you—”
“Pull your hand back, Burdetta,” he said, smiling. “Otherwise you’ll get hurt. I’m going to shut the door.”
“You unspeakable bastard.” Her whisper had no effect; the sun-splashed door began to close. He would have broken her wrist or fingers if she hadn’t withdrawn her hand quickly. The door clicked. Six months of risking her reputation, of performing every conceivable wickedness for him, and this was how it ended? With indifference? With the sort of dismissal a man would give a whore?
Burdetta Soames Halloran had been schooled in Southern graces, which included courage and the maintenance of poise in the face of social disaster. Although it would take days or weeks to compose her emotions—Lamar Powell had spoken to some animalistic side of her, and she had never loved any man more or more completely—it took less than ten seconds for her to compose her face. When she turned and carefully stepped down the first tall riser, her hoops raised in her gloved hands, she was smiling.
“Ready?” the hackman asked, unnecessarily, since she was waiting for him to jump and open the door.
“Yes, I am. It required only a moment to conclude my business.”
In fact, she had only begun it.
40
TURMOIL SWEPT THE CAROLINA coast that autumn. On the seventh of November, Commodore Du Pont’s flotilla steamed into Port Royal Sound and opened fire on Hilton Head Island. The bombardment from Du Pont’s gunboats sent the small Confederate garrison retreating to the mainland before the sun set. Two days later, nearby, the historic little port of Beaufort fell. There came reports of burning and looting of white homes by rapacious Yankee soldiers and revengeful blacks.
Each day brought new rumors. Arson would soon raze Charleston, which would be replaced by a city for black fugitives; Harriet Tubman was in the state, or coming to the state, or thinking about coming to the state, to urge slaves to run or revolt; for failure in western Virginia, Lee had been banished to command the new Department of South Carolina, Georgia, and East Florida.
The last proved true. Unexpectedly, the famous soldier and three of his senior staff appeared on horseback in the lane of Mont Royal one twilight. They spent an hour with Orry in the parlor before riding on to Yemassee.
Orry had met Lee once, in Mexico; yet because of the man’s reputation, both military and personal, he felt he knew him well. What a jolt, then, to confront the visitor and find he no longer resembled his published portraits. Lee was fifty-four or fifty-five, but his seamed face, shadowed eyes, white-streaked beard, and general air of strain made him appear much older. Orry had never seen a picture of Lee with a beard, and said so.
“Oh, I brought this back from the Cheat Mountain campaign,” Lee said. “Along with a portfolio of nicknames I’d be happier to discard.” His staff men laughed, but the mirth was forced. “How is your cousin, young Charles?”
“He’s well, the last I heard. He enlisted with the Hampton Legion. I’m surprised you remember him.”
“Impossible to forget him. While I was superintendent, he was the best rider I saw at the Academy.”
Lee fell to discussing the point of his visit. He wanted Orry to accept the commission in Richmond, even though he was no longer headquartered there and could not employ him directly. “You can be of great service to the War Department, however. It isn’t true, as the backbiters would have it, that President Davis constantly interferes or that he’s the person who actually runs the department.” Lee paused. “It is not completely true, I mean to say.”
“I plan to go as soon as I can, General. I’ve just been awaiting the arrival of a new overseer to run the place. He’s due any day.”
“Good news. Splendid! You and every West Point man like you are of infinite value to the army and the conduct of the war. The great failing of Mr. Davis, if I may in confidence suggest one, is his belief that there’s nothing wrong with secession. Perhaps in the South there is not. In Washington, I assure you, they consider it treason. I am not enough of a constitutionalist to state positively that the act was illegal, but I consider it a blunder whose magnitude is only now being perceived. But no matter what personal feelings you or any of us have about secession, one of its consequences is immutable. We shall have to win our right to it—our right to exist as a separate nation. When I say win, I am speaking of military victory. Mr. Davis, regrettably, believes the right will be awarded us if we merely press our claim rhetorically. That is the dream of an idealist. Laudable, perhaps, but a dream. What we did was heinous to a majority of our former countrymen. Only force of arms will gain and hold independence. Academy men will understand and fight the war as it must be fought, unless we plan to quit or be defeated.”
“Fight,” one of the staff men growled. Orry nodded to agree.
“Tha
t’s the proper spirit,” Lee said, rising; his knees creaked. He shook Orry’s hand, passed a social moment on the piazza with Madeline, then rode away to the duties of his obscure command. Orry put his arm around his wife and pulled her against him in the chill of the darkening sky. Parting was inevitable now. It hurt to think of it.
Next morning, further news came. Nine blacks from Francis LaMotte’s plantation had used basket boats, woven in secret, to float down the Ashley on the ebb tide. They had abandoned the boats above Charleston and fled south, presumably to the Union lines around Beaufort.
Along with that report, the day brought the overseer from North Carolina, Philemon Meek, mounted on a mule.
Orry’s first reaction was disappointment. He had expected a man in his sixties, but not someone with the stoop and demeanor of an aged schoolmaster; Meek even wore half-glasses down near the tip of his nose.
Orry interviewed Meek for an hour in the library, and the impression began to change. Meek answered his new employer’s questions tersely but honestly. When he didn’t know or understand something, he said so. He told Orry that he didn’t believe in harsh discipline unless slaves brought it on themselves. Orry replied that, except for Cuffey and one or two others, few at Mont Royal were troublemakers.
Meek then made clear that he was a religious man. He owned and read only one book, the Scriptures. Any kind of reading was hard for him, he admitted, which perhaps contributed to his strongly stated opinion that secular books, and especially fiction, were satanically inspired. Orry made no comment. It wasn’t an unusual attitude among the devout.
“I’m not sure about him,” Orry told Madeline that night. In a week, he formed more positive opinions. Despite Meek’s age, he was physically strong and brooked no nonsense from those who worked for him. Andy didn’t appear to like Meek but got along with him. So Orry packed his trunks and the Solingen sword, ready at last.
