A Different Day, A Different Destiny (The Snipesville Chronicles)

by Laing, Annette

  “The Earl of Chatsfield,” said the Professor, “He was the cousin of Viscount Chatsfield, who is better known to you guys as Mr. Thornhill.”

  “But,” Brandon yelled, “the Earl had money to start with! The Earl owned the land where the coal was found.”

  “That’s right. The land was his capital. Now I should add that Mr. Sutherland also had another kind of capital: He was the son of a minister, and had had a good education. If he had been an illiterate Irish laborer or a jute spinner, the bank would not have loaned him a penny. Not everybody has the same chances today, and in the nineteenth century, most people had very few chances at all. That’s why Mina went to America: People saw it as a land of opportunity, where land was free, and so were people.”

  “Except for slaves,” said Brandon quietly.

  Alex had a question now. “Why didn’t Mr. Thornhill want to be a lord? I heard what he said, about not being interested in running an estate and stuff, but I don’t get it. Why sell Balesworth Hall and give up a fancy title unless you have to?”

  “Oh, but he did have to. At least the way he saw it,” said the Professor. “You see, Mr. Thornhill needed to go home to his family in Georgia.”

  Hannah’s eyes got big. “I knew it! He was a biggie…a bigga… What’s that word?”

  “Bigamist,” supplied Brandon.

  “Thanks,” said Hannah, “He was one of those! He had two wives!”

  “Not exactly,” the Professor said. “He could not marry his second wife. Indeed, her very existence was a closely-guarded secret in 1851. You need to know a few things about Mr. Thornhill. He emigrated to America because he was failing in England. He liked gambling a little too much, and he lost the money he had inherited from his father, the old Earl of Chatsfield. Then he heard that it was easy to make a fortune in Georgia, and decided to set up his law practice in Savannah. But his wife did not come with him, and Mr. Thornhill was lonely, you see.”

  “That makes sense,” Brandon said. “But if he was lonely, why didn’t he take his wife?”

  “Aha,” the Professor said. “Lady Chatsfield, or Mrs. Thornhill as she was then, refused to come to America with him, and I can hardly blame her. Savannah was prone to malaria and yellow fever. So young Mr. Thornhill decided to cross the Atlantic alone. He could have got a divorce, but divorce in the 1830s was very expensive, so like most couples at the time who had problems, Mr. and Mrs. Thornhill simply split up.”

  “I knew it!” Brandon exclaimed.

  The Professor continued. “As the husband, Mr. Thornhill was given custody of the children. That’s how it was in the 1830s, and that’s why he took the boys. And then, of course, years later, the boys died.”

  “Wow, that’s sad,” Brandon said.

  The Professor nodded. “Later, Mr. Thornhill entered a relationship with another woman in Savannah. Then, after her master died, he bought her.”

  “He bought her? His girlfriend was a slave? That’s disgusting,” Hannah said.

  “I would tend to agree with you,” the Professor said. “But I cannot say for certain that I know what she thought of it. Perhaps she had no choice. She may have preferred being his companion to working in the fields, for all I know. He, however, genuinely fell in love with her, and that was where the trouble started. She looked as white as, well, any white person, but because some of her ancestors were African, the law said she was black, and it was illegal for a white person to marry a black person. A person could be blonde, blue-eyed, and still be considered black. In any case, after he freed her, Mr. Thornhill quietly gave her a house on a plantation he owned near the Florida border. There, she bore him six children, five of whom lived to adulthood.”

  Hannah said, “Hang on a second. You said that he took his sons to Georgia. Why didn’t he take Sarah, then?”

  “Because Sarah had not yet been born when he left for Georgia,” said the Professor. “And she wasn’t his child, anyway. She was Mr. Veeriswamy’s daughter. With Lady Chatsfield.”

  The three kids’ mouths were now hanging open.

  Brandon was first to say something. “You mean Lady Chatsfield, and Mr.Veeriswamy already were…”

  “A couple, yes, long before they married. Of course, they had to keep quiet about it, because it would have been a terrific scandal. But they had known each other almost their whole lives. Mr. Veeriswamy and his father had come from India with Lady Chatsfield’s father, who was an administrator in the British colony. Your Mr. Veeriswamy was raised partly as a servant, partly as a member of the family. Rather like Henry Watson, really.”

  “Was Henry their kid too?” Brandon asked. Anything seemed possible now.

  The Professor shook her head. “No, no, only Sarah. I think Lady Chatsfield just gave Henry the same sorts of privileges and opportunities that she remembered Mr. Veeriswamy having in her home when they were children. And, of course, she missed her two sons, who were taken from her. Henry was a sort of substitute son, just as you, Alex, were for Mr. Thornhill.”

  “That’s all very interesting,” said Hannah. “Not that it has anything to do with me.”

  After a long pause, the Professor said “All right, there is something else. Hannah, do you remember Jessie’s grandson, John? He was the father of Brandon’s Mr. Gordon, the dentist in Balesworth.”

  Brandon gasped, but Hannah wasn’t impressed. “No big. I mean, that’s kind of… So what? I never said more than two words to John. He was a filthy little monster.”

  “Never mind,” said the Professor hurriedly, as though she regretted mentioning it. “Forget I said anything. I don’t think it does matter.”

  “Except,” Brandon said, “that’s one more connection to Balesworth, isn’t it?”

  He looked the Professor in the eye. He sensed, not for the first time, that the Professor knew far more than she was letting on.

  “It may be,” said the Professor noncommittally. “But I suppose you will all want to know what became of Mr. Thornhill? Shortly after he returned to Georgia in the fall of 1851, he visited his other family. While he was on the plantation, he suffered a bout of malaria. It didn’t kill him, but it did weaken him, and so, when he had a heart attack a few days later, he didn’t have the strength to pull through. He knew he could not legally free his second family, so while he lay dying, he wrote travel passes for his partner and their children, so they could escape. His wife and children looked white, so nobody challenged them on the journey north, and they settled in New York… I’m so sorry, Alex. I know you became fond of him and he, in turn, was fond of you. He was shocked when you vanished from Balesworth Hall, along with Hannah and Brandon. He didn’t really think that his treatment of Jupe would upset you, because you had admitted to him that Jupe’s company had been dumped on you. To him, black people were put on earth to make white people’s lives better. He assumed that you thought the same way, just as a lot of English upper-class people thought in much the same fashion about the white working-classes in England. Mr. Thornhill didn’t care about Jupe any more than Mr. Sutherland cared about Hannah. Jupe was a convenient pawn in his game with his wife.”

  “So was I,” said Alex bitterly. “Wasn’t I? He just needed me to do stuff for him, and to make her jealous that he had replaced her sons with me.”

  The Professor looked troubled. “No, I don’t think that’s true at all. He was devastated when his sons died, and meeting a clever young man like you gave him some sort of hope for the future. He knew that the children in his second family couldn’t inherit his business from him, and he rather hoped that you would. He liked you, and enjoyed your company.”

  Hannah looked at Alex, and saw that this news had not made him happy. If anything, he seemed sadder than ever. He had tweaked a blade of grass and was rubbing it between his fingers.

  Brandon asked, “What happened to Lady Chatsfield and Mr. Veeriswamy after Mr. Thornhill died?”

  “Oh, they led a very quiet life. Because he died, there was no need for a divorce, and they got married. M
r. and Mrs. Veeriswamy moved into what would eventually become Verity and Eric’s house. The new Viscount Chatsfield was a good man, and he made a present of Weston Cottage to them, so that they owned it outright. Kintyre Plantation produced enough money to live on. They married and had two more children, whose last name was Veeriswamy.”

  “One of them must have been the ancestor of Mr. Veeriswamy from the train!” exclaimed Alex.

  The Professor nodded, smiled, and continued her story. “Their marriage caused quite a scandal, but, anyway, the new Mrs. Veeriswamy had lost so much respectability by her late husband’s actions that she was now considered only middle class. Sarah was bitterly angry about everything that happened. You see, she believed that Mr. Thornhill was her father, despite the evidence of her own brown hair, brown eyes, and olive skin. She kept the name Thornhill, and she never forgave her mother for lying to her. The family’s loss of prestige and income also harmed her own chances at marriage. But she did all right for herself. She was pretty and charming, and she married a man called Edward Hughes. After their wedding, they moved to the next county, Bedfordshire, and Sarah never spoke of or to her parents again.”

  “That’s where I met her when she was an old lady,” Brandon said, “when Mrs. D. and her kids were living with her. She was kind of uptight. ”

  The Professor smiled. “Sarah Hughes rejected her past, and became the very model of the proper Victorian lady. Her children never knew anything of their grandparents. If Mrs. Devenish or her sisters asked, they were told that those grandparents had died a long time ago, and eventually, they got the hint and stopped asking. Mrs. Devenish received Weston Cottage as an inheritance from her mother, but she never knew that it had once belonged to her grandmother.”

  Hannah said, “But why would the Veeriswamys give the cottage to Sarah when she never even spoke to them?”

  “I’ve wondered the same,” said the Professor. “I think it was Emma’s, Lady Chatsfield’s, one last effort to mend her relationship with her daughter. She thought it was all her fault, you see, everything that had happened. Anyhow, both she and Mr. Veeriswamy died in the early 1880s, and Sarah rented out the house for many years. When Mrs. Devenish, and her husband moved in, people in Balesworth mentioned that the house had once belonged to Mr. and Mrs. Veeriswamy, or to Lady Chatsfield and her Indian butler. But such stories never meant anything much to the Devenishes, because they had no idea they were related. All Mrs. D. knew about her grandparents was that they were named Mr. and Mrs. Thornhill.

  “That house made a huge difference to the Devenishes’ fortunes, though. Mrs. Devenish never had to pay a mortgage or rent, and so even after she was widowed, she could afford expensive schools for her daughters. During the First World War, she moved in with her mother in Bedfordshire, and rented out Weston Cottage, so she could save on living expenses and volunteer as a nurse. That’s when Brandon met her, in 1915, when she was living with her mother and Flora.”

  Hannah shuddered. “Tell me it’s not the same Flora I worked with…” But she already knew the answer.

  Alex changed the subject. “What about the calculator? Why wouldn’t you take back the calculator from me?”

  The Professor paused for a moment before she answered. “The calculator was never supposed to be in 1851 to begin with. But I learned that it had some sort of role to play before I could remove it. It was important that I didn’t take it before Time was ready.”

  “How did you manage to lose it in a field, anyway?” asked Hannah peevishly.

  The Professor laughed. “Oh, it wasn’t anything dramatic. I was just running some numbers before I bought the land from Emma Veeriswamy. I knew she didn’t want to own Kintyre. So I offered her a pretty low price, and she took it.”

  Hannah was appalled. “So you cheated Lady Chatsfield and you became a slaveowner? That’s evil!”

  The Professor waved aside Hannah’s outrage. “No, it’s not. I didn’t plan to make a profit, and I paid Emma and Sanjeev Veeriswamy the most I could afford. I bought it from them at the end of the Civil War in 1865, when slavery had ended, and the South was in ruins. It was still a lot of money, believe me. I simply hoped to recover some of that money by selling the land later. But I have never figured out the best time to sell. So, technically, I still own it, which means that I own a large part of Snipesville. Nobody knows that but us.”

  She got to her feet. “I’m going for some more barbeque. It’s really very good. Back in a minute.”

  But she did not return. When the kids finally went looking for her, she had vanished. Nobody knew who she was, and nobody remembered seeing her.

  Even Hannah noticed how quiet her brother was. It had been three days since their return, and Alex spent even more time than usual playing on the computer. When he wasn’t staring at a screen, he was lying on the sofa staring into space. It wasn’t like him. After she had mentioned her concern to their dad, Mr. Dias asked Alex if he was okay. Alex replied that he felt fine, and Mr. Dias, who was having a really busy week at work, was happy to let the subject drop.

  Not satisfied, Hannah now cornered her brother. “Look, I’m really sorry about how things worked out with Mr. Thornhill, but…”

  Alex cut her off. “I don’t want to talk about it, okay?”

  Hannah hesitated. “The thing is,” she said carefully, “I just got this in the mail.”

  She placed a large manila envelope on the computer keyboard. Alex looked at it for a moment, as though deciding whether just to brush it away. But then he slowly picked it up, opened it, and slid out the contents. It was a color photograph of him with Mr. Thornhill, taken in front of the Crystal Palace.

  “Did they have color photographs in 1851?” Hannah asked.

  “No,” Alex said, still staring at the picture. He blinked, and returned the photo to its envelope, then handed it back to Hannah. All he said was, “I’d rather have one that showed me with Jupe.” Then he returned to his computer game.

  Upstairs, Hannah carefully stored Alex’s new photo in the album that the Professor had sent him after their first adventure in 1940. Then she went to her room, and pulled out her own album. She had a manila envelope, too, and hers contained a color photo taken with Mina and Maggie on the day of the creeling. How the Professor had got that shot, she had no idea. But she was glad of it.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I extend my warmest thanks to the following fans of The Snipesville Chronicles who helped make possible the publication of A Different Day, A Different Destiny.

  Anon.

  Brenda Dartt

  Cynthia Frost

  Yvette Gordillo

  Norma Nicol Hamilton

  Jack & Joyce Howard

  Marky Lloyd

  Nancy Malcom

  Sharon McMullen

  Rebecca and John Murray

  Katie Olson

  Cathy Skidmore-Hess

  Wendy Turner

  Rebecca Ziegler

  Big thanks also to the following kids and adults from both sides of the Atlantic who read and commented on drafts of the manuscript at various stages: Miriam and Ellie Bryant, Rebecca and Alex Gordon, Julia Griffin, Joyce Harper, Fielding Keeley, Becky Laney, Sophie Lichtman, Bryan and Alec Ogihara, Laura Shelton, Cathy Skidmore-Hess, Annie Stevens, and Rachel Thomas.

  Once again, Kelley Callaway and Deborah Harvey gave of their time and talents to design this book. I am delighted and touched by their support.

  As ever, I owe many thanks to many academic historians, museum curators, archivists, and other kind folk for information on arcane topics. Although this is a work of fiction, it relies heavily on the work of professional historians: This book took me so long to write because I realized early on that I had forgotten (or never knew) so much Victorian history. Please support academic scholars and their work, because without them, the Snipesville Chronicles would not exist!

  For your convenience, I will post the links below on my website at www. AnnetteLaing.com

  Georgia It’s a w
eird thing to say, but I enjoyed a wonderful May afternoon at Whitaker Funeral Home in Metter, Georgia. Many thanks to the delightful Shaunta Ellis-Rivers for an informative and (dare I say it) entertaining tour. I’d like to make it clear that while the building of Clark and Sons Home of Eternal Rest, Inc. bears more than a passing resemblance to Whitaker’s, Shaunta and Aunt Morticia could not be less alike! I also thank the owners, Larry and Brenda Gould, the son-in-law and daughter of the founders, for their warm reception. As I told Mrs. Gould, I absolutely want them to bury me. Not now, of course.

  Dr. Jon Bryant is a goldmine of knowledge about nineteenth-century Georgia history, and I have exploited him shamelessly. He and Dr. Lisa Denmark, both former colleagues of mine at Georgia Southern University, answered my hapless questions about Victorian Savannah and its hinterlands.

  As I made clear in the first book, the Snipesville I describe is nothing to do with the *real* Snipesville, Georgia, a hamlet near Hazlehurst. Thanks, however, to Dusty Snipes Gres, a descendant of the founder of the real Snipesville, for her support.

  Visits to the Owens-Thomas House, the Green-Meldrim House, the Andrew Low House, and the Isaiah Davenport House, all in Savannah, helped me in constructing a mental picture of Mr. Thornhill’s home.

  The Kintyre Plantation house’s appearance is based on the Tullie Smith Farmhouse at the Atlanta History Center, should you care to visit. The Museum is one of the finest in the South.

  London

  Andrea Tanner, archivist for Fortnum and Mason, kindly looked up info about that amazing clock on the ground floor of the Food Hall. When my Georgia study abroad students and I popped in fifty pence in 2007, it played Dixie. But I learned from Andrea that the clock plays a variety of tunes at random, and that it was purely coincidence that it played Dixie for us....Or was it? Charles Babbage’s pickled brain, and a working version of his Difference Engine, are among the many fascinating exhibits in London’s Science Museum.