North and South Trilogy

by John Jakes

  The first night out, George drank too much champagne, waltzed with a young Polish countess, and surprised himself by spending the night with her. She was a charming, ardent companion, interested in the moment, not the future. He was pleased to discover his manhood had not atrophied. Yet the very detachment with which the young woman welcomed him to her stateroom and her bed only renewed his sense of love for Constance, and the attendant loss.

  His mood was imperiled even more on the third day, when the huge steamship encountered heavy weather and began to roll and pitch like a toy. Though warned by the purser’s men to stay off the decks, George wouldn’t. He was drawn to the vistas of impenetrable gray murk with great fans of white water rising up to smash the funnels and sway the lifeboats and swirl around his feet as he gripped the teak rail. It was noon, and nearly as dark as night. Images of Constance, Orry, Bent flickered in his thoughts. The past ten years seemed to trail across his memory like a ribbon of mourning crepe. He lost the feeling of renewal from Lausanne and plunged backward again.

  Something in him rebelled, and he sought to escape the bleakness by discovering its cause, by answering, if he could, certain questions that haunted him. Why was there so much pain? Where did it come from? The answers always eluded him.

  In the storm’s murk, he glimpsed Constance again. He saw his best friend Orry. A set of conclusions came neatly out of the box of his mind.

  The pain comes from more than the facts of circumstance, or the deeds of others. It comes from within. From understanding what we’ve lost.

  I comes from knowing how foolish we were—vain, arrogant children—when we thought ourselves happy.

  It comes from knowing how fragile and doomed the old ways were, just when we thought them, and ourselves, secure.

  The pain comes from knowing we have never been safe, and therefore will never be safe again. It comes from knowing we can never be so ignorant again. It comes from knowing we can never be children again.

  Losing innocence. Remembering heaven.

  That was the essence of hell.

  The liner’s whistle bellowed. Members of the deck staff rushed in every direction. George felt the engines reverse. A white-coated steward told him two small children of an Italian olive oil millionaire had been washed into the sea from the stern. A search was conducted until dark, with great difficulty; two of the ship’s boats capsized. The children were not found. Sometime during the night, curiously awake and tense beside the sleeping countess, George heard the engines throbbing differently. Persia was resuming her journey because there was nothing else to do.

  68

  ON SUNDAY, AT HIS home in Lehigh Station, Jupiter Smith received Charles’s telegraph message. He told his wife to keep supper warm and walked rapidly down the hill to the depot. The operator was just lowering the shutter behind the wicket. “Send this before you go, Hiram,” Smith said as he reached for a blank. He penciled quickly, in block letters.

  MR HAZARD EN ROUTE HOME ON CUNARD LINE.

  IMPOSSIBLE TO REACH HIM BUT AM

  CERTAIN HE WILL GLADLY WELCOME

  MRS MAIN FOR AN INDEFINITE STAY.

  REGRET CIRCUMSTANCES WHICH MAKE THIS NECESSARY.

  J. SMITH ESQ.

  Charles’s message had conveyed the essence of the situation at Mont Royal. How Madeline Main’s sister-in-law could be so harsh on a relative escaped Jupe Smith. He’d never met Ashton Main, thoµgh Constance had mentioned her several times, never in a complimentary way.

  Hiram’s key began to click. Smith stood silent in the dusty waiting room, feeling a familiar keen disappointment in the behavior of a majority of human beings Just no explaining it—

  As he opened the door to leave the depot, it occurred to him that perhaps someone else in the family should be informed of the appeal, in case help and encouragement of a more personal sort were needed. Self-centered Stanley couldn’t be counted on to speak compassionately for the family, but another member, could, now that she was reconciled with her brother, and considerably softened.

  “Hiram, before you quit, send one more, will you? This one’s going to Washington.”

  On Sunday, in the quiet of early morning, Sam Stout unlocked his Senate office. It was a lovely summer day; the office was already warm.

  At his desk Stout arranged a small stack of foolscap sheets and began to answer correspondence from his constituents, most of them dull-witted farm people he held in contempt. A couple from his old House district in Muncie had sent eight Spencerian pages describing their son’s qualifications for a Military Academy appointment. Stout knew nothing about the status of appointments from his home state, but he wrote “None available” and tossed the reply in a wire basket for his clerk to expand and send.

  He started to read another letter but gave up almost at once. He threw his pen on the blotter and surrendered to the misery he’d been fighting through a long, wakeful night. When he’d divorced Emily to marry Jeannie, he and the young woman had agreed Sam was too old, and too busy with his career, to start a new family. Fine. He’d trusted the little bitch to keep the bargain. Last night, after a champagne supper, she’d announced that she would deliver a child seven months from now. Stout went to a separate bedroom for the night.

  Not merely his personal life, but everything seemed to be failing. While giving speeches during his last swing into Indiana, he had sensed that his audience were sick of him and Republicans like him who waved the bloody shirt. Though it was just four years since Appomattox, the public was tired of divisive politics, tired of radical social programs. There were even some indications of disenchantment with the Grant administration, which had just taken office. Grant was a popular man but pitifully innocent. Stout’s more cynical acquaintances said it wouldn’t be long before the President’s cronies were thieving and pillaging right under his nose.

  It worried Stout. He’d backed Grant, though out of expediency, not principle. Now he feared he’d bet on a losing horse.

  His own shallow convictions reminded him of Virgilia Hazard’s stronger and more honest ones. That in turn reminded him of the physical side of their relationship. Virgilia seemed more alluring now that his wife had revealed her deceit. Perhaps he’d been wrong to toss Virgilia aside so hastily.

  He snatched a sheet of foolscap and began to write. If he could pull this off, he sensed that everything else would right itself in due course. He poured passion into the phrases, and loneliness—even a difficult admission of his mistakes in the course of their relationship. He felt as cheerful as a twenty-year-old bachelor when he posted the letter early in the afternoon.

  On Monday, Virgilia pulled her gray glove over the diamond ring on her left hand and picked up her portmanteau. A hack waited outside the Thirteenth Street cottage to take her to the railway station. She glanced around to be sure everything was in order. On the writing desk she noticed the insulting letter from Sam Stout. She’d forgotten it in the excitement of receiving Smith’s message and her preparation to respond to it.

  Virgilia’s mouth set. She put the portmanteau on a chair and worked quickly with a match and wax to reseal Stout’s letter. She inked lines through her own address and wrote his above it. Then she turned the envelope over and on the blank side printed NO.

  She mailed it before she caught the night express for Richmond and Charleston.

  On Tuesday, Willa again offered to help witþ the packing. Madeline had thus far put it off, as if anticipating some miracle. There would be no miracles.

  “All right, we’ll pack,” she said, defeated. “There isn’t a lot worth taking, but if we don’t move it out, she’ll destroy it.”

  She was wrapping pages from the Courier around the portrait of her mother; the brittle painting was now protected by glass and a frame. She heard the sound of a carriage and went to the door. It was Theo and his wife. The young Northerner pressed Madeline’s hand in his and said he was sorry. Marie-Louise, pink-faced and healthy in her third month of pregnancy, gave freer rein to her emotion
s. She cried in Madeline’s arms, and uttered sobbing condemnations of her father. Madeline patted her. It seemed she was always taking care of someone. She wished someone would take care of her.

  Charles came in with a wooden packing box he’d hammered together to protect the portrait. He hadn’t seen Marie-Louise in years, and there was a brief period of reintroduction. Charles’s manner was brusque.

  “Does your father know who really bought the plantation?”

  Marie-Louise nodded. “The news was all over Charleston by Saturday noon. Mama said Papa spoke of it at supper that evening.”

  “And what did he have to say?”

  She answered reluctantly. “That—that he liked his sister about as much as he liked everyone else in the family, which—” Red-faced, she blurted the rest: “Which wasn’t very much any more.”

  Charles chewed his cigar so hard he nearly bit it in half. “Fine, Splendid.”

  “Mama was so mad when she told me, she said a curse word. I’ve never heard her curse Papa before. She said he’s making so much money at the company now, he doesn’t need Mont Royal, and he hasn’t any feeling for the place. That’s the reason he sold it.” Madeline and Charles exchanged glances she didn’t see. “Mama’s just miserable over the whole business. I am too. Oh, Madeline, what are you going to do?”

  “Pack. Wait until Friday. Leave when Ashton arrives. What else can we do?”

  Willa took Charles’s hand. No one answered the question.

  On Wednesday, at dusk, Willa ran in from the lawn where she’d been teaching Gus a card game. “There’s a carriage in the lane. A woman I’ve never seen before.”

  “Damnation.” Madeline threw an old Spode saucer into the barrel, breaking off part of the edge. “I don’t need strangers coming here to peer at us and cluck over our misery.”

  She heard the carriage grind to a halt. A few moments later, the woman in the gray traveling dress with matching hat and gloves stepped into the doorway. Madeline’s exhausted face drained of color.

  “My God, Virgilia.”

  “Hello, Madeline.” The two women stared at one another, Virgilia uncertain of her reception. Charles clumped in from the bedroom, where he’d taken down a framed lithograph of the Plain at West Point. He nearly dropped it when he saw the visitor. Of course he remembered her, principally from her visit to Mont Royal with George and others in her family.

  She was a fire-spitting abolitionist in those days. She flaunted a superior morality, and a hatred of all things Southern. He recalled Virgilia outraging her host, Tillet Main, the day James Huntoon came to accuse her of aiding the escape of Huntoon’s slave Grady. She’d later lived with the runaway in the North.

  Charles particularly recalled her proud, insulting admission of guilt that day. He had trouble reconciling the old Virgilia with this one. He remembered a vicious tongue; now she was softspoken: He remembered a slimmer girl; now she was stout. He remembered a careless wardrobe; now she was conservatively fashionable, and tidy despite her long journey. He remembered her with one chin, not two, and it was all a keen reminder of time’s passage. In her case, time had dealt kindly.

  “How have you been, Charles?” she said. “The last time we saw one another, you were a very young man.”

  Still bewildered, Madeline remembered her manners. “Won’t you sit down, Virgilia?”

  “Yes, thank you. I’m rather tired. I sat up on the train all the way from Washington.” She removed her gloves. On the ring finger of her left hand she wore a diamond in a white gold setting.

  Madeline cleared a few stacked books from a chair and gestured the visitor to it. Charles lighted a lamp while introducing Willa. Madeline seemed nervous, on the verge of crying. He presumed it was because Virgilia’s arrival was one unexpected event too many. Emotions were strained in the whitewashed house. Pointless arguments had broken out several times during the past few days.

  Virgilia said, “I’d like to stay a day or two, if you’ll permit me. I’m here because George’s attorney telegraphed me about Ashton. We must find some way to undo what she’s done.”

  Madeline knotted her apron in her red-knuckled hands. “We have no room here, Virgilia. I’m afraid the best we can offer would be a pallet in the home of one of the freedmen.”

  “Perfectly adequate,” Virgilia said. She radiated a crisp cordiality, and an air of city sophistication. Charles couldn’t get over the change.

  “Please don’t think me rude”—Madeline cleared her throat—“but I just don’t understand.”

  Virgilia rescued her from the embarrassing silence. “Why I am here after all that happened years ago? Very simple. Once I cared nothing for my family, or my brother’s feelings. Now I care a great deal. I know George’s high regard for you and Orry, and this place he enjoyed visiting so much. I had opinions that wouldn’t allow me to enjoy Mont Royal. I offer no apology for them. I think they were correct, but that’s past. I know George would help you financially if that would resolve matters in your favor. Since it won’t, and he’s still somewhere on the Atlantic, I’d like to help in some other way if I can. I’ve changed many of my opinions but not my opinion of Ashton. She always impressed me as a shallow, spiteful creature. Especially unkind to the black men and women her father owned.”

  “She hasn’t changed much,” Charles said. He raked a match on his boot sole and then puffed on his cigar. “I’m afraid it doesn’t matter a damn what any one of us thinks. This place is hers. Come Friday, we have to get out or she’ll have the law on us.”

  Virgilia’s old militancy asserted itself. “That is a defeatist attitude.”

  “Well, if you’ve got reason for any other kind, you tell me,” he snarled.

  Madeline whispered, “Charles.”

  Virgilia’s gentle gesture of dismissal said she wasn’t offended. Willa said, “There’s a bit of claret left. Perhaps our guest would like a glass while I fix some supper.”

  None of them seemed to know what to say next. The uncomfortable silence went on and on, until Charles walked out. They heard him calling to his son.

  On Thursday, Virgilia asked Charles to stroll down to the river with her. It was a steamy, sunless day, a perfect reflection of their spirits. Charles didn’t want to go, but Willa said he must. To what purpose, he didn’t know.

  The sawmill had stopped work on Tuesday. Its employees awaited the pleasure of the new owner. On the mill dock by the smooth and placid Ashley, Virgilia walked among stacks of rough-cut cypress lumber.

  “Charles, I know that for many years I wasn’t very popular with the Mains, and justifiably so. I hope you believe I’ve changed.”

  Hands on hips, he gazed at the river. He shrugged to say it was a possibility, but only a possibility.

  “All right, then. Do you think we might form an alliance?”

  He scrutinized her. “We make a pretty unlikely pair.”

  “Granted.”

  “What kind of alliance?”

  “One dedicated to defeating that vile woman.”

  “There isn’t any way.”

  “I refuse to believe that, Charles.”

  Suddenly he laughed and relaxed. “I heard a lot of stories about you years ago, Miss Hazard—”

  She touched the full sleeve of his loose cotton shirt. He noticed her hand—blunt-fingered, work-roughened. “Virgilia,” she said.

  “Well, all right, Virgilia. I guess if you take all the spite out of those stories, what’s left is true. You’re about as tough as one of my cavalry sergeants.” Hastily then: “I mean that as a compliment.”

  “Of course,” she said, with a wry smile. She was pensive a few moments. “We have twenty-four hours.”

  “I suppose I could shoot her, but I don’t want to go to prison, and it wouldn’t solve anything. The plantation would just go to this piano merchant she’s apparently hitched up with.” He sighed. “Wish I could put the calendar back a week or so. Before the sale I might have been able to scare her off. When I was a trader in the Ind
ian Territory, I had a partner who taught me that fear was a powerful weapon.”

  Virgilia’s interest was piqued. “Wait. Perhaps you’ve hit on something. Tell me about this partner of yours.”

  He described Wooden Foot Jackson and some of their experiences. Then he remembered the incident involving the false travois sign, which he described.

  “Wooden Foot said fear was so powerful that it would trick you into seeing what you expected, instead of what was really there. I proved it. I saw a whole village in those tracks.” He shrugged again. He could draw no practical conclusion from the story.

  Surprisingly, it excited Virgilia. She whirled around at the edge of the pier. “What you expect instead of what’s real—I find that very provocative, Charles. Now tell me more about Ashton. Naturally you’ve seen her—”

  He nodded. “She’s older, like all of us. Still dresses like a bird of paradise. I don’t know what life’s like in Chicago, but she must take good care of herself. She’s still a beauty. No change there, either.”

  He found Virgilia staring with an intensity that puzzled him. She grasped his arm. “Will you go with me to Charleston this afternoon? I must find an apothecary.”

  He was astonished, but too polite to question her. A half hour later, alone with Willa, he said, “My God, did she fool me. She said she was here to help us. Instead, we have to chase down an apothecary. She’s probably got some female complaint. I think she’s crazy as ever.”

  On the drive to Charleston, Virgilia explained what she wanted from the apothecary’s, and why she wanted it. At first Charles was speechless. Then, slowly, his desperation turned skepticism to an almost euphoric hope. Everything on one throw of the dice.