The craftsman nodded toward the boy. “He mentioned meeting someone on the seawall.” He offered his hand, wiped clean of clay now, to Kate. “Name’s Daniel. Welcome to our gallery.”
“And I’m Kate. Hold on. Did you say our?”
His arm swung back to rest an elbow on top of the boy’s head. “This guy’s and mine. Though my son here’s mostly in charge.”
The boy nodded earnestly.
“That I can believe.” Kate’s gaze swept from sculpture to dresser to table to kiln. She tried not to let her eyes rest on the father and son, who shared the same smile, which broke over their faces at the same time—a little mischievous, a little surprising. “A working craftsman in the middle of the city. Amazing.”
Daniel winked at the boy. “Artisans, that’s what they call us in the tourist brochures. Half the town’d like to run us out for being a fire hazard—which is when the tourist-brochure makers and the wood-fired-pizza-place owners are our best friends. Other half’d like to run us out for a profession that makes a man sweat like even a horse isn’t allowed to here South of Broad—which would be when the Historic Charleston Foundation and Preservation Society folks become our best friends.”
“Your son helped me out just when I needed it.” She turned back to the boy. “But I don’t believe we exchanged names.”
She waited.
“It’s okay, big guy,” said his father.
“My momma says I shouldn’t ought to give out my name to strangers.” The boy wiped his mouth on the shirt cuffs that shot past his hands, curls falling into his face.
My momma says. Kate hesitated at the child’s use of the present tense. Hadn’t he told her up on the seawall that his mother had died? Something in his father’s face looked pained.
The boy crossed his arms petulantly.
“And she would be right,” Kate agreed. “But you and I met already, remember? You were the brave one between us.”
“No kind of coward.”
Daniel reached gently for him. “Don’t recollect anybody saying you were, Son.”
But the boy jerked away. “Just last fall I knocked a boy over—good twice my size—and took out his front teeth.”
The man nodded. “Reckon you did. And I reckon your momma would allow you telling this newcomer your name.”
The boy hesitated, then thrust out his hand. “The name’s Gabriel.”
Kate gave him her hand and shook his hard. “Nice. Like the angel.”
“’Cept I wouldn’t be one of them.” The boy’s feet shifted in the crushed shell. “Gabriel Ray,” he added and smiled—like he was pleased with the beat of it, the way its sound circled back: aggressive, angelic, and plenty dramatic.
Kate tilted her head, hearing something behind or beside what he’d said, something else tucked there in the scallop of sound.
“My momma named me. And I’m the fastest and smartest boy in the city.”
Studying his son’s face, his own flinching in pain again, the craftsman turned. Stepping back to his worktable, he began arranging ceramic tiles at the edge of a chess table, its wood grain glowing golden.
Kate addressed the child. “So . . . Gabriel Ray. Anybody ever call you Gabe?”
“My momma, she stuck to the whole full smack of the thing. But you can.”
“All right then. Gabe.”
“We good enough friends you can give out yours—with its tail end?”
“You were my very first friend here, remember? Drayton’s the tail end of mine.”
The craftsman paused in reaching for his tongs. Not looking up, he lifted a bottled Coke off the counter. “Old family name here, Drayton.”
“So I’m learning. Although I’m not sure whether that’s a good or bad thing.”
He adjusted more tiles. “Depends. Draytons built a rice plantation out on the Ashley River. Owned hundreds of slaves. Made themselves a fortune on the backs of those slaves.”
Kate squirmed but didn’t try to respond.
Daniel arranged more tiles. “Another Drayton, this one named Charles, a slave, testified against some of the other participants in a slave rebellion planned here.”
“The Vesey revolt,” Kate blurted out.
Daniel looked up. Nodded. “Good for you.” With a rubber mallet, he tapped several tiles in place. “Another Charles Drayton, this one white, built himself a fancy place down the street on what we call Battery Row. When you walk down East Battery, notice the mansion that’s got a whole different architectural style, with geometric railings, number twenty-five—the change thanks to some Union shelling.”
Gabe piped in, “It’s my favorite on the Row. ’Cause it’s the differentest.”
“Impressive,” Kate said. “You two know your stuff.”
Father and son exchanged knowing smiles.
Gabe nodded earnestly. “It’s our job.”
“I wonder,” Kate asked, “since I’m gathering Charleston’s not such a big place—the historic district, at least—if you know a woman named Lila Rose Pinckney. Another old family name, I believe.”
The craftsman glanced up again. Nodded.
Gabe reared back on his stool. “That’s our preacher’s name, Pinckney. Got two daughters, for the folks that like girls, which wouldn’t be me. Real nice family, the Pinckneys. They—”
The man shook his head at his son. “Different Pinckney. The one our friend here is meaning, she’s white.”
Gabe bounced on his stool. “Didn’t know there was a white kind. They cousins?”
But the craftsman addressed Kate. “Miz Rose’s been a customer of mine for years. Just yesterday mentioned a project she’s wanting to bring by. Heirloom she’s wanting adjusted.”
“I know which customer you’re meaning now,” Gabe said. “One with the silver corkscrew hair. Real strong pocket.”
“Strong pocket?” Kate asked.
“How we say it in Gullah. Means rich.”
As Kate watched, Daniel donned two padded gloves, plucked several tiles from the kiln, laid them in a metal trash can padded with newspaper, set the can in the fireplace, adjusted the chimney’s flue, lit the newspaper on fire, then covered the can.
Kate gawked.
The boy tiptoed closer. To Kate, he whispered, “The fire and smoke work with the copper and glaze. Raku’s what it’s called. Never know what pattern you’ll get.” To his father, he added, “Can I watch some stretch of longer?”
“You finished up calc for the day?”
“Calculus?” Kate turned to Gabe. “At your age?”
“I was finding a little trouble at school.”
“What happens when you go looking for it,” his father suggested.
Gabe shot a glance at his father and ducked his head. “I was too gifted to teach easy, they said. Too dang gifted, they said, only they didn’t say dang. We’re trying putting me ahead in math to see does that help with the trouble—me looking for it.”
“My question, Son, was did you finish your homework?”
Gabe pitched his head philosophically toward the beamed ceiling, the curls tumbling back from his face. “The day, you know, is just an arm long. You can reach clear across it.”
“I take it that means no,” said Daniel.
Gabe tipped his head back toward Kate. “That’s Gullah, too. My daddy, he knows it best. Means you can handle what you got to in a day. Or like when I saw you this morning early up there on the seawall, you looking sad. In Gullah, my daddy would say, ‘Look like she lived in sorrow’s kitchen and licked the pots clean.’”
“Wait. Do I really look sad?”
Gabe nodded gravely. “For folks who know you well as I do, yep. You stand up real tall—tall as you can for not being tall—and whip back that hair, and you smile pretty brave. But you got some kind of sad behind the eyes.”
“You don’t miss much, do you?”
Gabe padded up to his father’s arm. “Kate here’s likely needing a walk-through of a real working artisan shop.”
&nbs
p; Carefully Daniel removed the lid from the can, smoke billowing up the brick chimney. Then he poured water into the can, steam hissing from the tiles below. Watching as the steam cleared, Daniel fingered a leather cord at his neck.
The boy popped himself up onto a three-legged stool. “So we got fire here, Kate. And we got water.”
“That much I see.”
“And we got wood. Cypress. Got to be cypress—the furniture and the sculptures both. Watch now what the fire’s gone and made.”
With long wooden tongs, Daniel lifted a tile from inside the swill of ash. Copper glinted in swirls over an emerald-green background. The next tile was copper swirled over blue.
“Okay, that’s gorgeous.” Kate studied the tiles. “So you two make all this yourselves? And sell it yourselves?”
Daniel laid down his hammer. “With plenty of sales help on the floor of the gallery—since Gabe and I don’t just run this place.” He propped open the gallery’s side door. Stepping into the alley, Daniel ran a hand down the glossy flank of a black draft horse with a broad white blaze down his nose, a white mane and tail, and thick skirts of white feathering that fell from his knees and hocks a good twelve inches down to his hooves.
“So you knew there was a giant horse just out your side door?”
“His stable’s on Anson, but we bring him here now and then for a break,” Daniel said—as if that explained everything.
“There can’t be two like him in the city. He was pulling a buggy this morning. Don’t tell me you’re also running one of the carriage-tour companies.”
“Let’s just say that more than one income stream is a good thing in our situation. Got some bills we got to pay. And we—me and Gabe both—got tired of hearing the other companies’ pick of what stories they tell to the tourists.”
“The history’s wrong?”
“Not wrong so much as what’s missing from lots of them. Like if you don’t mention the ugly—the slave auctions, for instance, held on this very street—it didn’t exist.”
Kate’s hand dropped to the laptop in her backpack. “You know, it would probably be a little rude—the three of us just meeting today—if I started taking notes right now. But the stories the two of you probably know. I’d like to ask questions—if you don’t mind.”
She saw wariness flicker in Daniel’s eyes.
“I don’t mean today. Just . . . sometime. If you’re okay with that. I’m interested in history, too.”
Gabe lowered his voice to an admiring whisper. “The work she does is hangings.”
From where he’d bent over a front hoof, Daniel glanced back. “That right?”
Kate laughed. “I might need to explain.”
But Gabe had already slid off his stool, Kate following him, and slipped through the alley door to rest a hand on the horse—whose head appeared nearly half as big as the whole of the boy. She ran a hand down the animal’s neck, then back to the velvet of his muzzle. “Looks like a warhorse to me.”
Daniel let out the headpiece of the halter a notch. “Bred for war is right—way back. But Beecher here pulls a buggy full of people paying good money to get swept back in time.”
“And, Gabe, do you ride along?”
“Alltime after school and on weekends. The buggy business, he can’t do it too good alone, me being the one who lets him know when he goes talking too long and boring.”
Daniel chuckled. “My son speaks the truth.”
“My daddy mixes it up, though, fits songs to the stories and talk. Goes to sites nobody else even goes near. Best carriage tour in the city, that’s us: Gullah Buggy.”
“I’m sold.” Kate turned to glance back out the front window that opened onto East Bay.
A dark-skinned man—remarkably tall—in a suit stood facing the shop, his face livid, neck swelling above his tie like the whole top of him might blow apart.
From the window, obstructed by an outcropping of old brick, Kate couldn’t see who the man was addressing.
But stepping closer, she could hear most of what he was saying. Behind her in the alley, Daniel and Gabe were engrossed in inspecting a shoe of Beecher’s that was coming loose.
One of the voices outside the front window rose. “What possessed me to think that even after all these years you had one ounce, one ounce of compassion—or even good sense?”
A tangle of two voices. One of them possibly familiar—though it was hard to tell in the snarl of sound.
Kate moved closer to the front window.
The man she could see, his voice rising above the other, said, “I swear I don’t know why I didn’t just take the whole thing into my own hands back then. Or why I don’t now. You never were anything but his messenger pigeon, you know that? You never were.”
Kate leaned out farther through the open window.
His features contorted, fists clenched, the man in the suit might have caught sight of Kate watching him as he spun on one heel and stalked away.
Embarrassed, Kate leaned back, but then forward again as the second man, the one she’d not been able to see, scuttled out of the alley and onto East Bay, his head hunched down into the points of his shoulders.
Percival Botts.
“Wait!” she called from inside the shop. “Mr. Botts!” Bolting for the front door, she lifted a hand to the craftsman and boy in the alley and ducked out into the drizzle that remained from the fast-moving storm.
Botts had already disappeared somewhere down East Bay.
If he no longer lived here in Charleston, then he must just have driven in soon after they’d talked earlier this morning. So had he driven in solely to meet with her—and simply hadn’t yet returned her call? Or could it be he didn’t want her to know he was here?
Her laptop inside her backpack slapping her back as she ran, Kate jogged south on East Bay, the direction she’d seen Botts disappear. Becoming East Battery, the left side of the street turned from shops and houses to harbor. Kate bent to catch her breath.
Maybe it was idiocy, chasing him like this if they were going to meet soon. But nothing about her past memories of Percival Botts told her she could trust him.
Botts crawling out of his rental car, parked in front of their New England duplex, then scuttling in his black suit over their unshoveled walk—his spider legs jerking across the snow. Botts scowling at the cracks in their front window. Botts thrusting forward the divorce papers for her mother to sign. Botts refusing to meet Sarah Grace’s eye as she sank to the kitchen table . . .
Kate had lost track of him now. Unless that was Botts up ahead, turning right onto South Battery. Kate broke back into a run, reaching White Point Gardens in time to see him slipping through the gate of a sprawling white Victorian house—an inn, its sign announced—with a broad porch skirting its base and a turret above its left side.
So there. She knew where he was staying. She could even try to demand that he see her right now.
Suddenly nervous—Botts did that to people—Kate squared her shoulders and smoothed the jeans and top, badly wrinkled, that she’d plucked from one of her duffels back in the motel room.
A shadow winged close to her.
A great blue heron, its neck stretched long, swooped over the harbor, the tips of its wings skimming the surface as it arced right. Leaning into its flight, wings wimpled and poised for the next downbeat, the bird mounted the wind. Kate stopped to watch as it lofted, current to current, out toward the open sea. Then circled back toward Charleston.
As the heron arced back, the sun just edging out from behind the clouds caught the wet tips of its wings, now glowing gold. Kate shielded her eyes to watch.
It seemed not bound to this world—not to worries or death or distress. Not to falling-in families or nose-diving careers. It just flew. And reveled in that.
Something, Kate thought as she forced herself to walk toward the inn, I’ve never, not ever, known how to do.
Chapter 9
1822
Walking beside the mule that pulled hi
s cart, the creature’s nose bumping companionably against his side, Tom delivered the wrought iron heron to the mansion on Meeting Street three back from the water.
Something decorative for the garden, Tom—and large had been the extent of the order from this customer, one of his regulars. So he’d crafted the vision inside his head. And prayed the older couple who lived here would not see what that white girl Angelina had seen in his iron heron: the longing, the ferocity, the flight.
Leaving the order with the footman at the back entrance, Tom walked slowly up Meeting and, in front of the Pinckney house, pretended to inspect the mule’s front left leg. But he could see nothing of Dinah. He’d been hoping for a glimpse of her shaking out rugs on a piazza. Or stepping down into the garden to clip roses for the Pinckneys’ table.
Wanting to wait but aware of the sun’s sinking fast into the harbor—and the curfew bells that would be sounding soon—he hoisted the mule’s hoof to search for an imbedded pebble causing a limp the animal did not have.
Still no sign of Dinah.
On the piazza of the first floor, something fluttered. Two white girls, their skirts swishing around them, settled themselves into chairs: the girls who’d come to his shop to see about the damascened gate—breezed in like they owned the city and the whole of his shop, or the Pinckney girl had. And beside her, the Grimké—the one whose sister up north had been all but disowned by the family, people here whispered. Angelina, her friend had called her. Who’d looked at his heron and shuddered. This one, glancing both ways, opened a newspaper.
Tom scanned the length and height of the Pinckney house and its gardens. No Dinah.
The Pinckney girl batted the back of her friend’s Courier. “You know Father insists that real ladies do not read newspapers—that ladies have only to trust the governing of the world to men.”
“Which is one more reason your father doesn’t care much for me—the influence he thinks my sister might be having on me, Sarah and the Quakers she’s taken up with, and the influence I could be having on you. That’s right, isn’t it, Em? He’d had a bit too much of his bourbon last night, and I could see it there in his eyes at dinner, his dislike of me.” The Grimké girl lowered her voice to the pitch of a man’s. “‘Your inattention,’ your father said at one point, ‘to good Southern breeding. To our way of life.’”
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