‘Oh, that’s of course, like everything else,’ he smiled down at her. ‘Will you enjoy entertaining America’s President, my dear?’
‘I expect so. He can hardly be more formidable than Bonaparte. But it’s you I’m anxious about. You look troubled, Hyde —’ It was an effort to use his first name so publicly. ‘Are you sure you are well enough?’
‘Naturally, I’m well enough.’ He had seldom spoken to her so shortly. ‘If I am a little anxious and I had not meant to show — it is lest this whole business prove too heavy a charge on my friend Scarbrough. I was just now discussing with Mr. Jay the possibility of erecting some kind of festive pavilion where the major part of the entertaining could take place. After all, even Scarbrough’s new house has only so much accommodation. And everyone who is anyone in Savannah will want at least to see the President.’
‘Yes,’ said Jay eagerly. ‘I was telling your husband, ma’am, that I can see no reason why we should not erect a pavilion in some convenient spot — Johnson Square perhaps — with accommodation for all the hundreds who will throng to see the President. The private entertainment could be at the West Broad Street house, which I hope you will find fit for the purpose, Mr. Purchis; the major public ones in my pavilion.’ He was already happily employed in designing it in his head. ‘With a huge American flag for the ceiling perhaps? Plain outside, of course.’
‘An admirable plan,’ Hyde turned away from him to speak to Mayor Wayne. ‘I have another suggestion, sir. Is there any hope that the steamship Savannah will have arrived before Mr. Monroe does? It would add a splendid note to his visit if we could take him for a trip in her before she sails the Atlantic.’
‘Just so,’ said Mr. Wayne. ‘Mr. Scarbrough and I had been discussing that very thing. It seems, strangely enough, that there have been no bookings for the advertised trip to New York. We think it most probable that the Savannah will be here for Mr. Monroe’s visit, and, in fact, start for England very shortly thereafter.’
‘The first steamship to sail the Atlantic!’ Juliet turned to Mr. Scarbrough. ‘You must be a very proud man, sir.’
‘Yes, indeed.’ She thought he had lost a little weight. ‘But I wish we had had any answers to our advertisements. A trip to New York would have been an admirable introduction for the ship.’
‘And Julia — Mrs. Scarbrough might have come back on her, and got here in time to give Mr. Monroe the meeting. But tell me, do you and she still think of making the trip to England?’
‘No.’ He looked uneasy. ‘No, I believe not. I do not think Julia will be home in time.’
‘I’m sorry.’ The party was beginning to break up. Only Judge James stayed behind to examine Hyde.
‘Much better,’ was his verdict. ‘Yes, so long as Mrs. Purchis promises to keep a close eye on you, I do not see why you should not come back to Savannah, and join in the general excitement. I am sure we will have need of your good council. Besides, I have no doubt you would prefer to be in charge of your own affairs just now.’
‘What did he mean by that, Hyde?’ Juliet asked after the judge had left. ‘About your own affairs?’
‘Merely that business is not quite so good as it has been. It was bound to happen. The post-war boom could not last for ever. They’ve had just the same trouble in England, only it hit them sooner than it has us. Fortunately for me, having been over there, I saw it coming. I don’t think you are going to have to do without your cherry bounce yet, my dear.’
‘That’s a comfort! But, Hyde; Mr. Scarbrough. I thought he looked far from well.’
‘Yes, and McKinne with a face as long as fiddle, too. I am afraid the failure of the Savannah’s proposed trip to New York may have come at a bad time for them. I just wish they would not let it show. The worst thing that could happen for any of us, just now, is a failure of confidence; a run on the banks ... In short, I think, my dear, if you are agreeable, we will go back to town tomorrow. Would it be too much to ask that we give a party at once, of the most extravagant and frivolous possible kind, to celebrate my recovery and return to business?’
Her heart sank, but she knew Josephine would welcome such a proposition. ‘The very thing!’ And then, as it were reluctantly, ‘So long as you are certain you’re well enough.’
***
Miss Abigail amazed Juliet by kissing her when they parted. ‘Take care of him, my dear.’ And then, to add to the surprise. ‘But I know you will.’ It was at once olive branch and apology, and Juliet, kissed the old lady warmly in thanks and unacknowledged good-bye, could not help wondering what would happen when Josephine returned. Poor Miss Abigail ...
But the carriage was waiting, the servants drawn up on the steps for their farewells. These, too, had an unacknowledged finality about them. Alice had summed it up, that morning, in the privacy of Juliet’s bedroom. ‘They’re all in despair, ma’am. They know they’ll never see you again. The madam’s bound to come back, when she hears of Mr. Monroe’s visit.’
It was what Juliet had thought herself. Now she was aware of the depth of feeling in old Aaron’s ‘God go with you, ma’am,’ and touched by the sight of Sam actually scrubbing away a tear with a not very clean hand.
She was close to tears herself as they bowled away down the long avenue of ilexes. Luckily, she had too much to think about to let herself give way. No time to be thinking that she would never see Winchelsea again. Hyde had just made some casual remark about the journey. Which way did she want to go?
She had never made the trip by land. What in the world to say? ‘Oh,’ she smiled at him through the haze of unshed tears, ‘the longer of the two, of course, on a fine spring day like this. The air will do you good, I am sure.’
‘Yes, but I have the most sinking feeling you have forgotten your parasol. You will hardly wish to return to Savannah tanned like a gipsy.’
Her parasol! Josephine’s parasol. Josephine’s white skin that she had tried so hard to remember to preserve. How could she have been so stupid? ‘Good God so I have! Tell Charon to stop, my dear. I am sorry, but I cannot; I positively cannot drive all this way in the sun without some protection.’
‘That is precisely what I thought,’ he leaned forward to give the order, then paused at sight of Sam, grinning all over his face, barebacked on a pony, a flounced parasol brandished like a musket. ‘The Campbells are coming,’ he said. ‘Or, to be precise, relief is at hand.’
Sam had drawn level, to lean down and hand the parasol to Juliet. ‘Alice sent me, ma’am. She said you’d done forgot this. She had the whole wagon unloaded to get it out. The Lord He knows when they’ll get to Savanny. But you’ll be all right, anyway, with this.’
‘Yes, thank you, Sam. And thank Alice for me, too. It doesn’t matter how late she is, tell her. I shall manage.’ She turned to Hyde as Sam wheeled away, obviously delighted with the excuse for a ride. ‘I cannot imagine how I came to be so shatter-brained.’
‘No more can I,’ he agreed gravely. ‘Mrs. Purchis without her parasol!’ He leaned forward. ‘We’ll go the long way into town, Charon, by the Cottage.’ And then, to Juliet. ‘You would not like, I suppose, to stop, just for five minutes, and call there?’
The Cottage? What Cottage? And who in the world lived there? She bristled at him. ‘The Cottage! Calls! When you are just up from your sickbed! I never heard such nonsense in my life.’
Chapter Twelve
In Oglethorpe Square, the Pride of India trees were blossoming, their lilac-coloured flowers exquisite against delicate leaves and brown berries that still hung on from the autumn. ‘I’m glad to see there are a few berries left to make the robins drunk.’ Hyde helped her to alight.
Berries? Robins? Drunk? ‘What nonsense you do talk,’ she said indulgently, and turned to greet the house-servants who had run out at sight of the carriage.
The big silver tray in the hall was full of cards and notes, neatly arranged in two piles, the larger for her, the smaller for Hyde. They terrified her, but she knew Josephine would be eager t
o open them. Besides, it might be wise to do so with Hyde at hand to be casually probed for information. ‘Just look at them all!’ She pantomimed pleasure. ‘I believe I’ll have a glass of cherry bounce and take a quick look before I change.’
‘An excellent notion.’ Hyde followed her into the small par lour, carrying his letters. ‘As always, I see, you have the lioness’s share. But I have a piece of news for you, just the same. Moses told me. What do you think of the Savannah being here already?’
‘What! So soon? And we’ve missed all the excitement of her arrival?’
‘I’m afraid so. But we might drive over this afternoon, just to take a look at her, if you would like to?’
‘Oh, yes. I should like it above all things! And here’s an invitation for this evening.’ She made herself sound delighted. ‘The Broughtons are giving a concert. Priscilla particularly hopes that I will be able to come, to celebrate my return. News travels fast here.’
‘It always has,’ said Hyde. ‘You’ll go?’
‘Of course. And you?’
‘I beg you will excuse me. Priscilla Broughton will play her harp and her daughters will sing. I think it is more than a convalescent should be expected to endure.’
‘Shame on you! And I know well enough what you would be at. You will be off to the Club, to meet your friends and talk business.’
‘Well,’ he said reasonably. ‘It’s a long time since I have done so.’
‘Just so long as you do not overtire yourself. Remember —’ she struck a more characteristic note — ‘there is our own party to be considered. We cannot afford to have you on the sick list for that.’
Juliet felt oddly unprotected going out for the first time without Hyde. It was tiresome, too, that she had never been to the Broughtons’ house, since they had been up north during here first, short visit to Savannah. But at least Priscilla and her three strapping daughters had visited her at Winchelsea. There would be no fear of her failing to recognise them.
The Broughton house stood in its own lot at the far end of Madison Street, beyond Chippewa Square, where the town ended and the common began. As her carriage turned in at the elaborate iron gates of the walled garden, Juliet remembered something William Jay had told her. Mr. Broughton’s father had come from Charleston and had built his house in imitation of one of the Charleston single houses she had seen during her brief stay there. Yes, the carriage had turned on the sweep to draw up in front of the long porch of a big house standing sideways to the road. Steps led to the porch and above it she could see the second porch on the upper floor. What had Mr. Jay told her? ‘They entertain upstairs,’ he had said. ‘Nonsense, it seems to me, since the downstairs rooms are inevitably cooler.’
She blessed him now, as she trod lightly up the porch steps and saw that the downstairs rooms were being used as cloakrooms for the guests. She handed her light pelisse to the servant in attendance, took one reassuring look in the big glass, and went on upstairs as if she had known the house all her life.
Hyde had been quite right. Mrs. Broughton did play the harp, and execrably she did so. Then, to add insult to injury, she acted as accompanist while one plain daughter after another screeched out the romantic ballads that had been fashionable in Europe five years before. When the youngest one began on poor Mr. Burns’s song, ‘My love is like a red red rose,’ Juliet thought her penance must be nearly over. She also became, uncomfortably, aware that she was being stared at. Well, nothing surprising about this. Alice, tying up her curls with a green ribbon that matched her dress, had confirmed that she was in looks tonight, ‘You’ll wipe all their eyes, ma’am, and no mistake.’
But there was, just the same, something disconcerting about the quality of this stare. She opened her ostrich feather fan, grateful for the hot rooms that provided her excuse, and waved it casually before her face for a moment, then held it still to peer through the green-dyed feathers. Yes, there he was, at the far side of the room, staring at her as if the very strength of his gaze would bring her eyes round to meet his, as indeed it had.
For a moment, eyeing him through the fringe of green feathers she thought she was going mad. It was Fonseca! Impossible. He lay buried, she knew, at Hyde’s expense, in a remote corner of the Old Colonial Graveyard. Another covert glance was reassuring: this was not Fonseca returned from the dead. She had been misled by a superficial likeness. This saturnine stranger, dark and sallow like Fonseca, had also the look of a European. Something at once indefinable and unmistakable about the cut of the evening dress and the way he wore it marked him as from the other side of the Atlantic.
Now, despite the concealing fan, he must have become aware that she was looking at him. A finger went up to his lips, casually, as if to stroke the luxuriant moustache, his message for her only. Keep silent. But what in the world was she to keep silent about?
The singer was quavering to the end of her song:
‘Till all the seas gang dry, my love,
And the rocks melt in the sun,
And I will love you still my love,
Till the sands of life are run.’
What nonsense it was, Juliet thought, joining enthusiastically in the applause, and how she hoped Miss Deborah would not be incited to give an encore. The rest of the audience seemed to be of the same opinion. There was to be dancing, later, why waste more time in this penance?
Mrs. Broughton had something to say. She was urging the gentlemen to escort the ladies across the hall to the refreshment room, and, coyly, suggesting that she had provided illuminations outside in what she modestly referred to as ‘the yard’. If any of them wished to see her European knot-garden, it was but to fetch a pelisse or a shawl; they would find it bright as day out there.
Of course. Juliet remembered her now, enthusing, with obvious jealousy, over the mature gardens of Winchelsea. ‘I’m a bit of a gardener myself,’ she had said. ‘As you well know, Mrs. Purchis. Nothing like yours, of course.’
The move across the hall had begun. Juliet looked around, almost frantically, for someone she knew. Where was William Jay tonight? Doubtless, like Scarbrough and various others of Hyde’s friends, he had cut this party in order to meet him at the Club. Very likely, now, they were snug over smoked oysters and punch, deciding how to entertain the President of the United States.
And the dark stranger was waiting for her, inconspicuously, in an alcove of the hall that must be crossed to reach the refreshment room.
‘Enfin.’ He held out his arm, as if to lead her downstairs and out into the garden, but Mrs. Broughton, who was hovering in the hall, marshalling her guests, was on to him at once. ‘Why, Monsieur Tarot, I thought you knew our Savannah customs better by now. You will take Mrs. Purchis in to supper if you please. And, by the by, I collect you to have not met before. Josephine, my love, allow me to present Monsieur Tarot, recently from France. You will find him, I know, as irresistible as all the rest of us have done.’ A roguish smile. ‘After supper, monsieur, you may take your partner out to admire my garden, if she pleases.’ She turned away, to make an unwilling young lawyer squire her plainest daughter.
‘Josephine, mon amour,’ the stranger echoed Mrs. Broughton’s phrase, but in French.
‘Let us speak English, sir. It is more polite, here, where so few understand French.’ But there was nothing for it but to let him take her arm.
‘More polite, perhaps, but more dangerous.’ This, again, in French, then, at her quick, angry glance, changing to equally fluent English. ‘Very well, madame, since you insist, let us by all means drink our second-rate champagne in English, so long as, afterwards, you will give me the pleasure of a French turn in the garden.’ There was something so extraordinary about his tone that Juliet thought, if Hyde had been there, she would actually have run to him for help and comfort. But Hyde was at the Club, eating smoked oysters.
She smiled up at the stranger — Monsieur Tarot, Mrs. Broughton had called him, but something about his expression had told her that this was not his name, and
that Josephine would have known. ‘Very good, sir. But let us not forget that I am starving.’ They were across the hall now, in the crowded room where refreshments were being served, and private conversation was impossible. Mercifully, everyone seemed to know Monsieur Tarot, so introductions were unnecessary. ‘You have been in town for some time, sir?’ She made it the casual question of a new acquaintance.
‘A few weeks. Long enough to hear everyone sing the praises of “the devoted Mrs. Purchis”. I cannot begin to tell you how I have looked forward to this meeting, madame.’ His tone warned her that she should understand infinitely more by this than the simple words. Whoever he might be, he was no casual acquaintance of Josephine’s. What, oddly, she found herself unable to decide was whether the bond between them was one of love or hate. She pushed cold turkey and ham this way and that on her plate, eating hardly at all. Anything to avoid the threatened tête-à-tête in the garden. If she could only delay until the dancing began ...
‘I thought you were starving, madame?’ His voice chimed in with her thoughts. ‘The food is not to your liking? You will permit me to fetch you something else?’ And then, seizing a moment when a broad masculine back shielded them from the rest of the room. ‘You must see that we have to talk, Josephine, and the sooner and more privately the better. You do not, I am sure, wish me to make any public announcement about our relationship.’ His smile was a covert threat. ‘You must give me credit, I hope, for my self-restraint in awaiting you here in town, rather than paying you a visit in that splendid home of yours, which, frankly, I long to see.’
Winchelsea!’ The large man had moved away. ‘Yes, you must certainly visit my husband and me there some time, monsieur. It is something quite out of the ordinary, I can tell you.’
‘So I have heard. And also that Mr. Purchis is positively one of Savannah’s leading citizens. I quite long to meet him.’ Again there was no mistaking the threat in his voice. What could he tell Hyde about Josephine? ‘He is not here tonight?’ It was not, in fact, a question. He must have made it his business to find out.
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