by Susan Wiggs
“I didn’t think I would like it.”
He sent her a rakish wink. “Next time I tell you you’re going to like something, trust me.”
Sixteen
“Try it. You’ll like it.”
“But it’s alive.”
“It’s just lying there waiting to be eaten. I promise, it won’t fight back.”
“And that makes it permissible to eat it?”
“Abby, live oysters are a delicacy. People of quality eat them all the time.”
“People of quality also hunt foxes and club them to death. That doesn’t mean I would participate in such a thing,” she stated with a sniff.
“Leave the poor girl alone, son,” his father said from the head of the supper table. “It’s a poor host who forces unwanted food on his guest.”
Jamie never took his eyes off Abigail. “Oh, she wants it. I can tell she wants it.”
“Truly,” his mother said, “autumn is the best time for bay oysters.”
“I couldn’t agree with you more, dear,” her husband said.
“Charles’s grandfather started the oyster beds a half century ago,” she explained to Senator Cabot, who happily sucked down an oyster followed by a swig of stout dark beer.
At the other end of the table, Helena and Rowan ate their share while flashing each other private looks and secretive smiles. Jamie couldn’t believe the senator hadn’t guessed his elder daughter was engaged in a love affair with the professor, but Franklin Cabot had glaring blind spots when it came to his daughters.
At the moment, the younger one was studying the oyster on her plate with a mixture of curiosity and revulsion. Something about her always made Jamie want to smile. She was that rarest of creatures, a woman devoid of pretense. For that reason alone, he liked her rather well. It had been a long, long time since he had found himself able to like a woman.
“Just one,” he coaxed, convinced she would thank him. “It’s just a little swallow, my dear.”
She glowered at him. “I am not your dear.”
“No one is,” he agreed. “It’s just an expression. Eat the oyster, Miss Cabot.”
“I will not.”
“My mother’s cook went to considerable trouble to gather and shuck them for supper.”
“If she’s the cook, why didn’t she cook them?” Abigail pushed her plate at him. “You should have it instead.”
He pushed it back. “Eat the damn oyster.”
“I will not.”
“Coward.”
“Bully.”
“And you call yourself a woman of science. You won’t even—”
“Must you argue about everything, Abigail?” Mr. Cabot asked.
Glaring at Jamie, she picked up the half shell. “Very well, but only to silence Mr. Calhoun.”
Jamie knew very well that wasn’t the reason she capitulated. Interesting and unfortunate, he thought, how quick she was to obey her father.
Holding the thing perfectly level in front of her face, she squeezed a lemon wedge into the shell.
“It moved,” she screeched, dropping the oyster to her plate.
Jamie picked it up again. “That was your hand, goose.” He leaned across the table, touching the edge of the shell to her lower lip. “Stop being a baby.”
She nearly went cross-eyed, looking down at the oyster in front of her. Jamie bit the inside of his cheek. He couldn’t remember the last time a woman had made him want to laugh. Yet it happened all the time when Abigail was around.
“Just eat it right from the shell,” he advised. “Pretend it’s a spoonful of delicious soup.”
Taking a deep breath, she shut her eyes and opened her lips. Jamie tipped the oyster into her mouth. Her eyes flew open, blazing with alarm.
“Too late, dear,” he whispered. “You’ll have to swallow it now. It would be rude to, well, you know.”
She screwed up her face and gulped hard.
“Oysters are a proven aphrodisiac,” he pointed out, still whispering so the others wouldn’t hear.
She made a small choking noise, reached for her glass of wine and took a deep drink. Finally, she pressed a napkin to her lips and seemed to regain a modicum of control.
“I just thought you’d want to know that.”
“Why?”
“You’re out to trap a husband. Feeding him oysters is not a terrible idea.”
She flicked her gaze to her father, who ignored her, as usual. The senator was fully engaged in conversation with Jamie’s parents and oblivious to both his daughters.
“I am not out to trap anyone,” Abigail maintained in a low voice.
“Sorry. Poor choice of words.”
“Perhaps the terrible idea is in trying to get Lieutenant Butler’s attention at all.”
“Believe me, you already have it. What did he call you in his last letter? The dainty repository of all life’s hopes and dreams. Yes, I believe that was it. The man does know how to turn a sincere phrase, I’ll say that for him.”
“What the devil are you two whispering about?” Jamie’s father asked, not unpleasantly. His mood was well lubricated by a good amount of stout.
“Just plotting the overthrow of the government, sir,” Jamie said, winking at Abigail.
“I should never have let you see his letters,” she said through clenched teeth.
“How else will I know what he expects? He’s on the hook, Abby. You just have to land him.”
“That’s the part I’m afraid of. When he discovers that I’m the letter writer, not Helena, he’ll probably run screaming into the woods.”
Where the devil did she get such a low opinion of herself? he wondered, exasperated. Why did she care so much what people thought? Why did her father’s opinion rule her?
Perhaps Jamie could understand that. He knew his parents regarded him with a negligent affection that was almost an afterthought. Every possible maternal instinct had been bred out of his mother, who had been taught that no woman of quality raised her own children, but gave them immediately to a wet nurse and then a nanny.
Jamie’s earliest memory was not of his mother at all, but of a dark, fleshy arm tucked protectively around him, a gentle round face framed by a homespun kerchief. Her name was Igee, and from the day of his birth, she’d seen to his care and training. One day, not long after he’d published his brother Noah’s name in the Chesapeake Review, Igee had hurried into the schoolroom where his tutor, Master Whittaker, had been drilling him on his sums. Igee’s face had shone like a full moon as she beamed at Jamie. “That’ll be enough of lessons now,” she said. “The child needs a bath and a change of clothes, because he’s going to eat supper with the grown folk today.”
Jamie had been buffed and scrubbed like a show horse on fair day. Igee cleaned and trimmed his hair and fingernails; she scoured behind his ears and put him in his Sunday best, shoes and all. He still remembered the way she planted him in front of the tall, freestanding mirror in his mother’s boudoir, her chubby hands pressing his shoulders.
“Don’t you look a sight, honey,” Igee declared. “Don’t you look a picture.”
“Do I?”
She straightened his little neckcloth. “You the prettiest thing I ever did see. You so pretty, I could eat you up.” Her laughter and his giggles rang as fresh as a dream in his memory.
Jamie’s supper with the grown folk turned out to be his final one for a long time, though he hadn’t known it that day. He’d minded every manner that had been drilled into him. He said please and thank you and he ate what was set before him. He never spoke a word except that which he was invited to say, and he remembered not to kick the table leg with his foot.
At the end of the meal, his father had folded his hands on the table, cleared his throat and said, “You’re nearly grown now, son.”
Jamie was proud to hear his father declare him nearly grown. But even so, he wondered why his mother looked so serious, why he could hear Igee crying softly in the next room.
“Tomor
row you’ll be going away to St. Swithin’s School. It’s in Philadelphia, son. They’ll give you a fine education there.”
It had been Noah who’d accompanied him, trying to pretend Jamie was going on a great adventure, not stepping into a nightmare that would haunt him for years.
Pulling himself back to the moment and to the woman sitting across from him, he put on his most dazzling smile. “Nobody’s going to run screaming from you, Abby, honey,” he said.
She was still green around the gills from the oyster. She started to say something, then pressed her fist to her mouth and fled the table.
Seventeen
Abigail needed a breath of fresh air. She left through the back of the house, passing the gun room, the stillroom, the pantry and storerooms that smelled of molasses and drying herbs. The cook’s boy directed her to the door, which opened out onto a screened porch. Beyond that, she found a kitchen garden at the rear of the house, where a few hardy vegetables struggled through the chill autumn weather. Following a path downhill between an arch of ancient rosebushes, she emerged into a more formal garden of lush smooth lawns littered with fallen leaves and bordered by espaliered fruit trees contorted into unnatural shapes.
She’d survived the ordeal of the oysters, but in more important matters she was filled with doubt. What had begun as a harmless, almost playful flirtation of letters had somehow careened out of control. Her correspondence with Lieutenant Butler had fast escalated to a romance of deception.
Abigail used to pride herself on her honesty. Now she engaged in falsehoods on a daily basis. For a person who had never been good at lying, she was learning from a master—Jamie Calhoun.
He pretended to be a man of simple needs—the desire to serve his country—but she was coming to realize that he possessed hidden complexities she could only begin to imagine. And why should she imagine them at all? He was nothing to her, a mere device, someone to consult about the baffling rituals of courtship, much like an encyclopedia or an oracle, perhaps. He would probably enjoy being considered an oracle.
At the bottom of the garden, not far from the wind-bitten shoreline, she spied a low wrought-iron fence forming a rectangular border around a cemetery plot.
Dried yellow grasses waved in the cold sea breeze, and thorny bushes struggled along the fence, bulbous crimson rose hips showing through the dying foliage. For the most part, the markers sat low in the grass and lacked ornamentation save for a cross or brief verse carved into the stone.
Drawn by curiosity, she entered the fenced area and walked between the sad monuments, scoured and pitted by the salt air. Carved into the headstones were the names of Calhouns through the ages, the earliest being Samuel Calhoun of Bristol, England, 1684. He Was Seven Years a Sea Captain and Fathered Seven Sons and Seven Daughters… No wonder the plot was so large.
She was half-afraid to visit the newer-looking graves, for she didn’t like to think of Albion as a place of tragedy. Silly, she told herself. People died. It was all part of the mysterious circle of life.
Instinctively her sharp eyes flicked to the sky, but it was too early yet for stars. At Albion, Mrs. Calhoun had explained, they served supper early so they could talk late into the night.
“You all right, miss?”
Abigail twirled around, grasping the wrought-iron fence for balance. “Julius. You startled me.”
The boy made no apology but came into the cemetery through the iron gate.
“I enjoyed the riding today,” she said. “And I owe you a great deal of thanks. You’re a fine teacher for a timid rider, Julius.”
His slightly bashful smile further endeared him to her. “Glad to hear it, ma’am.”
Abigail faced the rows of stone monuments. “I suppose you think this is a strange occupation, wandering amidst the headstones.”
He hooked his thumbs into the pockets of his trousers. “I reckon. But I don’t reckon the dead mind.” He walked over to one of the less timeworn graves. “Lacey Beaumont Calhoun,” he said, picking up a spray of purple asters. “She gets fresh flowers on her grave every Sunday, even in winter.”
Beloved mother, cherished wife…. Abigail could see that she had died back in 1852 at the age of twenty-six. Yet her grave was tended like a shrine, years later.
“Someone must miss her very much,” she said.
“Reckon so.”
Sensing a deeper truth, she said, “I wonder who that could be. Do you know, Julius?”
“Some of the old folks used to whisper about it,” he said. “They say my granddaddy tends her grave because he loved her and could never have her. On account of she was married to his cousin.”
It sounded terribly tragic to Abigail, like an opera by Herr Wagner she’d gone to see at Ford’s Theater last summer. Unrequited love, illicit desire, dying young—it had all happened to the Calhoun family.
Maybe that was the reason Jamie shied from emotional involvement, the reason he was so cynical about romance and indifferent about Albion.
“And who is your granddaddy?” she asked, confused.
“Mr. Charles Calhoun,” said Julius matter-of-factly.
She shut her mouth to stifle a gasp. Charles Calhoun—Jamie’s father—was this boy’s grandfather.
Julius moved on to the newest monument of all, a squat fieldstone with a polished brass plaque, the earth around it covered by fallen leaves.
“And this here’s for my daddy,” the boy whispered, folding himself into a sitting position on the grass and brushing dry leaves from the base of the grave. “It’s where he should be, anyways, but he ain’t here. This marker’s just for remembering.” Taking out a small, hand-carved figure of a running horse, he set the token atop the stone. “Hi, Daddy,” he said.
Abigail’s throat stung with tears as she read the inscription on the brass plaque: Noah Calhoun. Son of Charles Calhoun. Champion rider, beloved husband and father.
So Julius was Jamie’s nephew, she realized with a jolt.
“You must miss your father terribly,” she said.
Julius nodded.
“I met your mother today,” she told him. “Your uncle Jamie took me to the place on King’s Creek.”
“I aim to work it myself, soon’s I turn sixteen.”
Abigail felt a tingle of insight. The bottomlands around King’s Creek would disappear if the proposed railroad expansion went through. The people there would be put off their land.
“He was starting up a horse farm of his own,” Julius continued. “Would have turned it into the best in the state. Mama sent me back to Albion on account of…” He eyed her from beneath lowered lashes. “Well, here at Albion, they look after me real good.”
Look after him, she thought in a fury, as though he were a piece of property, as his ancestors undoubtedly had been.
“What happened to your father, Julius?” she asked.
“He went on a horse-buying trip overseas. He and Uncle Jamie bought horses in Ireland, Spain, Morocco, Tunisia.” Julius’s eyes shone. “They always sent us special treasures. A silk scarf for my mama, a set of brass bells for me. Daddy said I’d get to go with him one day. But on the last trip, Uncle Jamie came home alone. He was real skinny, had a mess of whiskers and he smelled funny. Told my mama that Daddy died on the other side of the world. He was a real good man, my daddy, and I purely miss him.”
A strong wind, redolent of the marshy air, rolled in from the east. Abigail watched a raft of sandpipers take flight to the east, and she stood in contemplative silence, aching for the boy whose father lay forgotten in some unknown land.
At last, she was beginning to understand Jamie Calhoun. He’d always maintained that he’d got himself elected to Congress simply because he was bored and it was what men of his class did to show their commitment to civic duty.
She knew better now.
Eighteen
Senator Cabot was sound asleep even before the side-wheeler Larissa cleared Chesapeake Bay and churned into the mouth of the Potomac River. The travelers had d
ecided to return to town by the water route. Jamie had made his point about the railroad issue on the coach trip, so for now he chose comfort over utility. Helena and Professor Rowan were off somewhere as usual, undoubtedly misbehaving and loving every minute of it.
Abigail stood at the figured wrought-iron rail, watching the pattern of early-evening stars coming out over the bay. Emerging from one of the grand saloons of the riverboat, Jamie joined her at the rail but she hardly spared him a glance.
“Are you in a temper?” he asked her.
“What if I am?”
“Then I’d feel compelled to tease you out of it.”
“Don’t bother. It won’t work.”
“Why not?”
“You’re the cause of it, that’s why.”
He laughed. “You’ll have to do better than that. Your spirits are low, and I am the cause?”
“It’s silly, isn’t it? Makes you seem more important than you are. But since you asked, the answer is yes, I’m cross with you.”
“Why? I thought a weekend in the country would please you. Didn’t I bring you to a place so dark you could see all the stars?”
“Yes.”
“And didn’t I teach you to ride a horse?”
“Yes,” she admitted again.
He moved close, pressing his shoulder to hers so that she couldn’t ignore his warmth. “Didn’t I teach you to kiss? Perhaps you need further study in that area.”
“No.” She sidled away from him. “I don’t need anything more from you. Ever.”
She could hear him counting under his breath. Then he said, “I’ve obviously missed something. Only yesterday we were the best of friends sharing a delightful holiday. You taught me about the stars and planets, and I taught you to ride and flirt.”
“We’re not friends, best or otherwise. A friend is someone who knows you. He shares himself, even the parts that are difficult to share. You keep too many secrets to be anyone’s friend.”
He spread his arms. “I’ve told you a great deal about myself. Brought you to Albion. Introduced you to my parents. Isn’t that sharing?”
