North and South Trilogy

by John Jakes

  “No, but she’ll join me soon.”

  “How splendid you look in your uniform.” Ashton’s smile for the secretary was noticeably warmer. “Is he working for you, Judah?”

  “I am happy to say he is.”

  “How fortunate you are. Orry, my dear, we must take supper when all of us can find time. James and I are positively dizzy with the social whirl. Some weeks we scarcely have five minutes to ourselves.”

  “Quite right,” Huntoon said. His glasses steamed in the cold; the two words were his contribution to the conversation. Ashton waved and flirted with her eyes at Benjamin as her husband helped her into their carriage.

  “Attractive young woman,” Benjamin murmured as they moved on. “I was charmed the moment we met. It’s pleasant for you to have a sister in Richmond.”

  No point hiding what would eventually be public knowledge. “We are not on good terms, I’m afraid.”

  “Pity,” said Benjamin, with a smile of condolence that was small, perfect, and hollow. I am sailing with a master navigator of the political seas, Orry thought. He knew he would never hear from Ashton about supper. That suited him perfectly.

  “Ashton?”

  “No.”

  Turning away from his hand and his pleading whine, she moved her pillow to the edge of the bed, as far from him as possible. She puffed the pillow and buried her left cheek in it. Just as delicious thoughts of Powell stole into her head, he bothered her again.

  “Quite a surprise, seeing your brother.”

  “An unpleasant one.”

  “Do you really plan for the three of us to dine together?”

  “After he banished me from the home where I was raised?” A contemptuous monosyllable answered the question. “I wish you’d be quiet. I’m worn out.”

  Worn out with him, anyway. Of Powell she could never get enough—not enough of his skilled lovemaking or his decidedly unconventional personality, which she was beginning to discover and appreciate.

  Ashton saw Powell at least once a week, twice if Huntoon’s schedule worked in her favor. The assignations took place on Church Hill. Although there was still risk in going to his front doorstep, she preferred it to sneaking in through the back garden. In fact, she rather liked the danger of arriving on Franklin Street in the daylight; once inside, she was completely safe, which wouldn’t have been true at some tawdry rooming house.

  James never questioned her about the dalliance. He didn’t even know about her mysterious absences from their house. He was too stupid, too preoccupied with his petty tasks at the Treasury Department, which kept him working till eight or nine every night.

  Powell not only fulfilled Ashton with his occasionally cruel lovemaking, he also fascinated her as a person. He was a hot patriot, yet ruthless in his devotion to his own cause. There was no paradox. He loved the Confederacy but hated “King Jeff.” He believed in secession but not in this secessionist government. He intended to survive the doomed war and prosper.

  “I have a year or so to do it. Davis will blunder along unchecked for some time yet. Our cause is just—we should and we could win. With the right man leading us, I could become a prince of a new kingdom. Under present circumstances and the present dictator, I’m afraid all I can become is rich.”

  A patriot, a speculator, an incomparable lover—she had never met a man quite as complex, and surely never would again. By comparison, Huntoon suffered even more than he had in times past.

  No matter. The marriage, frail from the beginning, had now perished. The past few months had convinced Ashton that Huntoon couldn’t provide social or financial advancement because he lacked the slyness, the nerve, and the brains. In that one short argument with Davis, he had fashioned his own noose and sprung the trap. Weekly, her loathing grew, as did her certainty that she was in love with Lamar Powell.

  In love. How strange to realize the familiar words could apply to her. She had experienced the same emotion only once before. Then Billy Hazard had rejected her in favor of Brett, starting the chain of events that ended with her damned brother banishing her from Mont Royal.

  Ashton doubted that Powell loved her. She judged him incapable of loving anyone except himself. It didn’t concern her. She had enough to give for both of—

  “Ashton?”

  Her back was still to her husband. She snarled a vile word and pounded her fist on the pillow. Why wouldn’t he leave her alone? “What is it?”

  A soft, repulsive hand crept over her shoulder. “Why are you so cold to me? It’s been weeks since I was permitted my marital rights.”

  God, even when he whined of love he sounded like a lawyer. He was going to pay for disturbing her. She rolled away, tossing her hair, found a match and struck it. She jerked the chimney from the bedside lamp, lit the wick, and slammed the chimney back. Braced on her elbows, she pulled her nightdress above her hips.

  “All right, come on.”

  “Wh—what?”

  “Get that smelly nightshirt off and take what you want while you can.” The lamp set small fires in her eyes. She bent her knees, spread them, clenched her teeth. “Come on.”

  He struggled with the long flannel garment, his voice muffled inside. “I’m not sure I can perform on command—” As he dropped the shirt beside the bed, exposing his white body, she saw he was right. Huntoon looked ready to cry. Ashton laughed at him.

  “You never can. Even if that scrawny thing does show a little life, it’s no better than a thimble inside me. How did you ever expect to keep a wife content? You’re pathetic.”

  And she snapped her legs together, jerked her nightdress down, seized the lamp, and left the bedroom.

  Huntoon listened to her marching downstairs. “You mean bitch,” he shouted, momentarily not caring whether Homer or any of the other house people heard him. Serve her right if they did.

  The anger wilted as quickly as the slight stiffness, all he had been able to manage while she yelled at him. Her cruelty did something more than hurt him. It confirmed a suspicion that had been with him for some days. There was another man.

  Huntoon flung himself back in bed and put his forearm over his eyes. Everything in Richmond was awry. He was trapped in menial work for a government he had first distrusted and now despised. He felt the same about Davis, whose foes no longer formed a company or a regiment, but a small army. Important men: Vice President Stephens; Joe Johnston; Vance of North Carolina and Brown of Georgia, governors who said Davis was usurping their powers; Toombs, the former secretary of state, to whom Davis had been forced to hand over a brigadier’s commission to stop his scathing attacks.

  The President dictated to the army and truckled to the Virginia clique, as if that were the only way to make his shabby pedigree acceptable. He was botching the war, mismanaging the nation, and—an easy extension in a distraught mind—thwarting Huntoon’s ambition, thereby causing the rift with Ashton.

  For an hour, he lay imagining her naked with another man. Some officer perhaps? That wily little Jew with his cabinet post and his fine manners? Or could it be a man like that sleek, patently untrustworthy Georgian, Powell? Dry-mouthed, Huntoon pictured his wife coupling with various suspects. He wanted to know the man’s identity. He would confront her; demand that she give him the name of—

  He stopped thinking that way. He couldn’t do it. Knowing would probably kill him.

  When two hours had gone by, he heaved himself out of bed, donned his robe, and went downstairs. The house had grown cold. His breath plumed visibly against the glow of a lamp in the parlor. He stepped into the doorway.

  “Ashton? I came to apologize for—”

  The sentence trailed away. He grimaced. She breathed lightly and evenly, curled in a large leather chair, fast asleep. Her legs were drawn up near her bosom and her arms clasped around them. On her face a smile of dreams, sensually contented.

  He turned and stumbled toward the staircase, his ears ringing, that smile acid-etched on his memory. Tears came. He hated her but knew he was powerl
ess to do anything about it, which only worsened the feeling. He climbed the stairs like an old man as the hall clock tolled three.

  43

  AT BELVEDERE, BRETT CONTINUED to fight her own daily war with loneliness.

  One consolation: Billy’s letters sounded more cheerful. His old unit, Engineer Company A, had returned to Washington and was quartered on the grounds of the federal arsenal along with two of the three new volunteer companies congressionally approved in August—B from Maine and C from Massachusetts.

  Billy still maintained a starchy pride in belonging to “the old company.” But he wrote that most of the regulars accepted the new recruits and were attempting to make them overnight experts in every skill from pontoniering to road building.

  The newly constituted Battalion of Engineers incorporated the old cadre of corps regulars, and was now attached to McClellan’s Army of the Potomac and commanded by Captain James Duane, ’48, an officer Billy respected. In order to stay with the battalion, Billy’s friend Lije Farmer had been required to resign as captain of volunteers and take a regular army commission as a first lieutenant. Oldest one in the Potomac Army, he claims, but he is content, and I am glad he’s with us.

  Brett was happy her husband was back where he wanted to be. With winter bringing military hibernation, she hoped he would be relatively inactive and thus out of danger for several months. She wondered about chances for a leave. She missed him so; there was many a night when she slept only an hour or two.

  She helped around the house as much as she could, but that still left great stretches of empty time. Constance had gone back to Washington to be with George. The strange, ill-tempered colored man, Brown, was there, too, gathering more strays. Virgilia had won a place among Miss Dix’s nurses and wouldn’t be returning. Brett was by herself, moody and lonesome.

  One steel-colored December day, she bundled up, walked to the gate of Hazard’s, then up the hill to Brown’s building. She found two of the children, a boy and a girl, studying at a board with Mr. Czorna, the Hungarian. His wife was stirring soup at the stove. Brett greeted each of them.

  “Morning, madam,” the gray-haired woman replied, deferential but not especially friendly. Each had an accent: Mrs. Czorna’s heavily European, Brett’s heavily Southern. Brett knew the couple didn’t trust her—not exactly a novelty in Lehigh Station.

  She started to say something else but noticed a child in the adjoining room. Sitting on a cot beside the partition dividing the area, the little coppery girl stared at her hands with her head bowed.

  “Is the child ill, Mrs. Czorna?”

  “Not sick, not that kind of ill. Before he go, Mr. Brown bought her a turtle in a store. Two nights ago, when we had the snow, the turtle crawled out the window and froze. She won’t let me take it and bury it. She won’t eat, she won’t speak or laugh—I miss her laugh. It warms this place. I don’t know what to do.”

  Touched by the sight of the forlorn figure in the other room, Brett followed her impulse and spoke. “May I try something?”

  “Go ahead.” The statement, the shrug, said a Carolina plantation girl didn’t seem the right person to deal with a runaway black child. It was a familiar canard.

  “Her name’s Rosalie, isn’t it?”

  “That’s right.”

  Brett walked to the dormitory and sat down beside the little girl, who didn’t move. In the open palm at which the child was staring lay the dead turtle, on its back—not smelling good at all.

  “Rosalie? May I take your turtle and give him a warm place to rest?”

  The child stared at Brett, nothing in her eyes. She shook her head.

  “Please let me, Rosalie. He deserves to be warm and snug while he sleeps. It’s cold in here. Can’t you feel it? Come help me outside. Then we’ll go to my house for some cookies and cocoa. You can see the big mama cat who had kittens last week.”

  She folded her hands, waiting. The child stared at her. Slowly, Brett reached out to grasp the turtle. Rosalie glanced down but didn’t say or do anything. After Brett found the child’s coat, she asked Mrs. Czorna for a large spoon, and they went out behind the whitewashed building. Brett knelt and used the spoon to chisel a hole in the wintry ground. She wrapped the turtle in a clean rag, laid him away, and replaced the soil carefully. She looked up to see Rosalie crying, emotion shaking loose at last in silent heaving sobs, then audible ones.

  “Oh, you poor child. Come here.”

  She stretched out her arms. The little girl ran to her. While the sharp wind blew, Brett held the trembling body. She stroked Rosalie’s hair and, with a small start, made a discovery. In her years of helping on the plantation, she had picked up bundled black babies or held the hands of older children many a time, yet always stopped shy of the ultimate giving—an embrace.

  Had she been guided by some unexpressed belief that Negroes were somehow unfit for a white woman to touch? She didn’t know, but this moment in the gray morning jarred her to awareness. Rosalie felt no different from any other child hurting.

  Brett hugged her tight and felt the little girl’s hands slip around her neck and then the cold wetness of her cheek pressing hers for warmth.

  44

  AUNT BELLE NIN DIED on the tenth of October. She had been sinking for days, the victim of what the Mains’ doctor termed a poison in the blood. She was alert to the end, smoking a cob pipe that Jane packed for her and commenting on dreams that had shown her scenes of the afterlife. “I don’t feel bad about going, except for one reason,” she said through the smoke. “I’ll probably meet my two husbands on the other side, and I could do without that. I’m leaving a better world than I was born into—the light of the day of jubilo will be breaking next year or soon after. I know it in my heart.”

  “So do I,” said Jane. They had agreed for a long time that if war came, the South would fail and fall. Now freedom was a scent on the wind, like that of rain before a heat spell broke. Aunt Belle took several more puffs, smiled at her niece, handed her the pipe, and closed her eyes.

  Madeline readily consented that Aunt Belle be buried at Mont Royal the next day—the same day a fire swept Charleston. There was scorched earth for blocks, six hundred buildings lost, billions of dollars’ worth of property. Black arsonists were blamed. The news reached Mont Royal the evening after the funeral; a courier galloping to the Ashley plantation warned of possible uprising.

  While the courier was speaking to Madeline and Meek, Jane was walking alone in the cool moonlight by the river. A creak of boards at the head of the dock alarmed her. Cuffey was always watching her these days, and the moment she turned and saw the dark, threatening silhouette of a man, she thought he had followed her. She stood motionless, filled with fear.

  “Just me, Miss Jane.”

  “Oh, Andy. Hello.” She relaxed, pulling at her shawl. The early winter moon lit his face as he turned his head slightly, approaching in a cautious, shy way.

  “Wanted to say how much your aunt’s passing grieved me. Didn’t think it was my place to speak to you at the burial.”

  “Thank you, Andy.” To her surprise, Jane found herself gazing at him slightly longer than politeness dictated. She had recently grown much more aware of him.

  “Like to sit down a minute? Visit?” he asked. “Don’t get much of a chance to see you, working all day—”

  “Aren’t you chilly? You have nothing but that shirt.”

  “Oh, I’m fine.” He smiled. “Perfect. Here, let me help you—”

  He grasped her hand so she wouldn’t fall as she sat on the edge of the dock. A fish leaped, scattering liquid moonlight. When it struck him that he had been forward when he touched her, a look of mortification appeared on his face. That made her think all the more of him.

  Truthfully, Jane was as nervous as he was. She had never had much contact with boys in Rock Hill. Too independent, for one thing. Too scared, for another. She was a virgin and had been sternly advised by Widow Milsom to keep herself in that state until she found a man sh
e loved, trusted, and wanted to marry. She knew she was attractive, or anyway not ugly. But none of the gentlemen around Rock Hill had marriage in mind when they attempted to court her.

  “Terrible about that fire in Charleston.”

  “Terrible,” she agreed, though she felt no sympathy for the white property owners. She had no desire to see lives lost, but if every plantation in the state burned down, she wouldn’t mind.

  “Reckon you’ll be starting north soon.”

  “Yes, I suppose. Now that Aunt Belle’s buried, I’m—” She checked, not wanting to say free, in case it would hurt him. It was a potent word, free. “—I’m able to do that.”

  He examined his fingers, searched the bright river, finally exploded. “Hope you don’t mind me saying something else.”

  “I won’t know till you say it, will I?”

  He laughed, more at ease. “Wish you’d stay, Miss Jane.”

  “You don’t have to call me miss all the time.”

  “Seems proper. You’re a fine, pretty woman—smarter than I’ll ever be.”

  “You’re smart, Andy. I can tell. You’ll do even better when you learn to read and write.”

  “That’s part of what I mean, Mi—Jane. Once you leave, won’t be anyone here who could teach me. Nobody to teach any of us.” He leaned closer. “Jubilo’s coming. The soldiers of Lincoln are coming. But I can’t get along in a white man’s world the way I am now. White people write letters, do sums, carry on business. I’m no better fixed for that, I’m no better fixed for freedom than some old hound who lies in the sun all day.”

  It was not a plea so much as a summation of the plight of a majority in the South: the black people. With Andy, she believed the day of freedom was rapidly approaching. How could slaves meet and deal with the change? They weren’t prepared.

  She felt a prick of anger then. “You’re trying to make me feel ashamed because I won’t stay and teach. It isn’t my task. It isn’t my duty.”