“You must have hated them,” Prudence said.
“In the abstract, I suppose we did,” Teddy answered. “The South was still a bitter place when people like the Dicksons began coming down here to build their winter palaces on our islands. They were wealthy beyond our wildest imaginings, especially after the hardships of the war years and Reconstruction. They were the victors, we the vanquished.”
“Eleanor described to me how you met,” Prudence said.
Teddy’s face brightened. “It was only the second winter they’d spent on the island,” he said. “Eleanor told me later that she loved wandering through these woods, and she’d done a lot of it, anytime she could manage to get out of the house and away from her mother’s supervision. But she never ventured as far as the swamp. She’d been warned about its dangers.”
“I was told she helped her father design the stables.” Later, Prudence thought, I’ll tell Teddy what Eleanor confided about the eyes she felt watching her from deep in the live oaks. About the fears that had begun to haunt her. For now it was important not to interrupt his flow of memories.
“She and Philip rode every morning. I’d see them sometimes in the distance when I was crossing over to the mainland, cantering along the shoreline as though they hadn’t a care in the world. They were very close, father and daughter. That may have been the only reason he finally agreed to our marriage. Eleanor convinced him that I did truly love her for herself and not the fortune she would someday inherit.”
“But you didn’t meet until that second winter,” Geoffrey pressed.
“When her horse got away from her and I managed to grab his reins and lead him back toward Seapoint. I think we fell in love the moment we first looked into one another’s eyes. We knew. It was as simple as that.”
“And when did you take her to Wildacre?”
“That was odd. It was just before the Dicksons sailed back to New York, right before Christmas. I already knew that I would follow them, and that I’d stay there until we got her father’s permission to marry. No matter how long it took. Eleanor was curious about my family, but she understood that their opposition might be as strong as her father’s. She agreed to wait to meet them until everything was official.”
“What happened to change that?”
“We got careless, the way happy people often do. There’s a small, spring-fed pond on the island, not far from Wildacre. We boys used to swim there when the weather got unbearably hot. The water is crystal clear and always cool. It bubbles up from somewhere deep below the surface. From the moment I first took Eleanor there, it became our special place, where we thought we could be private and safe. And we were. Until the day Aunt Jessa found us.”
Teddy paused to get his bearings. “This way,” he said, pointing toward a narrow deer path through a dense growth of palmettos.
“Wait, Teddy,” Prudence pleaded. “You can’t leave it like that.”
“Aunt Jessa promised to keep our secret. And when she left us, she folded Eleanor into her arms as though she were a long-lost Bennett child. I should have known then that if Aunt Jessa had seen us, it was more than likely someone else had also.”
“Who?”
“I never managed to find that out. But whoever it was told my father. He prides himself on knowing everything that happens on the island. So when he informed me that he’d learned I’d been meeting secretly with some woman and that he had a good mind to ship her to the mainland, I told him everything. Who Eleanor was and that I planned to follow her to New York and win her father’s permission to marry her. You would have thought I’d handed him a pot of gold. He insisted that I bring her to Wildacre.
“Two days later I did. They were all in the parlor, waiting for us. My father, Lawrence, Aurora Lee, and Maggie Jane. A wall of Bennetts. The girls were polite and welcoming. So was Lawrence. I thought things were going as well as could be expected, and then suddenly my father stormed out of the room. No explanation. The next day the Dicksons sailed for New York.
“That was when my father began to put pressure on me to give her up. Abandon this wild idea that I was going to save the Bennett fortunes by marrying the heiress to what had been our little kingdom for generations. I told him it wasn’t like that, and that nothing he could say or do would make me change my mind. He stopped berating me, but then Lawrence joined the fray, delivering ultimatums far more threatening and bizarre than Father’s.
“The atmosphere at Wildacre was poisonous, so I traveled to New York earlier than I’d planned and I didn’t come back until a week before all of you arrived. I don’t know what happened during the months I was gone, but on the surface, at least, my father and Lawrence seemed to have come to terms with what I was doing. You know the rest.”
They’d broken through the undergrowth into a sandy clearing over which loomed one of the largest live oak trees on the island, its dense shade cooler by several degrees than the air along the path they’d been following.
“This is it,” Teddy breathed.
“It’s beautiful,” Prudence said.
“Majestic,” Geoffrey agreed.
“Aunt Jessa said a tree like this is sacred, and that when it finally dies, as everything must, all the souls who found release from pain by seeking its protection are set free forever. She said it was a good place to hide our secrets.”
“And easy to find when you wanted to add to them,” Geoffrey said.
“That, too,” Teddy agreed. He walked to the foot of the tree and paced three steps out from the trunk, kneeled down, brushed aside a thick carpet of decaying leaves, and began to dig in the sand. “We didn’t bury it very deep.”
“Can you tell if someone has dug here recently?” Prudence asked.
“Aunt Jessa, you mean?” He paused for a moment. “Sand is very forgiving. It leaves no traces. Unless you mark a spot, you’ll never find it again.”
Geoffrey and Prudence watched as Teddy dug. When his shovel made a clunking noise, all three of them caught their breath and then laughed aloud. Prudence could feel her heart racing as the outline of the box was uncovered, and then the box itself, its lid scoured by time and sand. With one quick jerk, Teddy wrenched the box from its hiding place and sank back onto his heels.
“I’m almost afraid to open it,” he said, brushing sand and leaves from his hands. “Prudence, will you do the honors?”
“No, Teddy. If Aunt Jessa left something here for you, she’d want your eyes to be the first to see it.”
But she sat down as close to him as she could get, Geoffrey on his knees beside her.
Slowly Teddy pried at the metal lid until he felt it move. He laid it upside down on the ground and lifted out a small package neatly wrapped in a piece of cloth and tied with kitchen twine. “I didn’t put this here,” he said, handing it to Prudence while he rifled through the items that lay beneath. “But the rest of these things are mine.” He held a perfectly oblong rock between his fingers, its surface as smooth and shiny as glass. “I found this on the beach one day. I don’t know where it came from, but I used to imagine it had been spewed out of a volcano. And this,” he said, fingering the peeled, hollow stem of a thumb-width piece of live oak, “is my first attempt at carving a flute.” He counted out half a dozen wickedly sharp arrowheads. “You used to be able to find these all over the island,” he reminisced.
“It feels like a book, Teddy,” Prudence said, her fingers tapping impatiently along the sides of the calico-wrapped package.
“Open it,” he directed.
Geoffrey slipped the blade of his pocket knife beneath the tightly knotted kitchen twine.
“It’s someone’s diary,” Prudence said, paging quickly through the leather-bound journal whose pages were covered with a man’s spiky handwriting. She held it out to Teddy without attempting to read any of the entries.
“ ‘This book belongs to Ethan Bennett and recounts his journey into manhood from the eve of his eighteenth birthday until the Lord shall please to call him Home,’ ” Te
ddy read.
“The uncle whose portrait hangs in the Wildacre library,” Prudence whispered. She pictured the handsome, earnest young man bent over his journal in the light of a single candle, his blond hair curling on the nape of his neck and hanging over his forehead. He would have eight or nine good years left before war was declared, forever altering the course of his life.
“I wonder why she put these here,” Teddy said, holding out a photograph he’d slipped from between the pages of the journal. “It’s a picture of Eleanor, though I can’t imagine where Aunt Jessa got it.”
It was indeed a posed photograph of Eleanor, but not the Eleanor Prudence had known. This Eleanor wore the crocheted collar, lace-inset sleeves, and wide-skirted, tight-bodiced dress of thirty years ago. Her hair was braided and looped around her ears, an expression of infinite sadness on the fine-featured face looking into the camera lens.
Prudence turned the photograph over. A name was written on the back in the same spiky handwriting she had seen in the journal.
Selena.
She handed it to Geoffrey, who closed his eyes as if the image and the name were too painful for him to bear. “I suspected something like this, though I couldn’t tell you why. It was just a feeling.”
“I don’t understand.” Teddy stared at the photograph of his Eleanor, turning it over to read the name written on the back.
“The answers lie in that journal,” Geoffrey told him. “And back at Seapoint.” He put the lid on Teddy’s childhood treasure box. “Do you want to keep it, or shall I bury it again?”
“No more secrets,” Teddy said, tucking the box under one arm, sliding the photograph into the inner pocket of his coat where it would lie against his heart. “No more secrets.”
CHAPTER 27
“I don’t know much about my uncle Ethan,” Teddy said when he, Prudence, and Geoffrey had settled themselves into the library at Seapoint. “He was rarely talked about.”
Philip Dickson was out with his estate manager inspecting the damage done by last night’s storm and Abigail had gone to the chapel to spend the afternoon beside Eleanor’s coffin, leaving orders that she was not to be disturbed.
“You knew him as a child, Teddy,” Prudence admonished.
“Yes, and that’s how I remember him. As a child would.” Teddy shrugged. “He was a very somber man. Rarely smiled, never laughed. Something about his nieces and nephews made him deeply melancholy. I used to catch him watching us. The intensity of his stare was unnerving. Aunt Jessa cautioned us against making too much noise when he was around. We knew he was frequently in pain and that we had to be careful not to bump into him or leave a ball or a toy out where he might trip. It was as if he lived inside a fenced enclosure that no one else was allowed to enter.”
“How old were you when he died?” Prudence asked.
“It was within a year of the war ending,” Teddy said. “So I was nine.”
“That’s old enough to have accurate memories,” Geoffrey commented.
“I recall so much about those days after my father came home. But Uncle Ethan is never in the foreground of what I see when I close my eyes. There was a sense that he wouldn’t last very long. Some veterans didn’t. They might appear to be in good health, but the heart had gone out of them. They sickened and died of nothing but the absence of hope. Tough men who had survived the worst days of the war were defeated by the peace.”
“Aunt Jessa still lived at Wildacre then?”
“She was never far from my uncle’s side. My father recovered within a few months but by that time Sherman had laid waste to most of eastern Georgia. Uncle Ethan’s wounds were more severe; he kept to his bed and then to a chaise longue on the veranda until just before the surrender. Aunt Jessa hovered over him the way she did my mother. He was a long time coming back to himself, and then I think it was only because she chivvied him into it.”
Teddy held the calico-wrapped journal in one hand as if uncertain what to do with it. He looked pleadingly at Prudence.
“If it becomes too difficult,” she said gently, “we can take turns reading from it.”
Teddy nodded. He unwrapped the calico and opened the journal to the first page. “ ‘This book belongs to Ethan Bennett and recounts his journey into manhood from the eve of his eighteenth birthday until the Lord shall please to call him Home,’ ” he read again, in a thin voice that shook with anticipation.
Prudence smiled encouragement.
Teddy skipped rapidly through the early pages, reading a line here and there that described daily life at Wildacre and a growing tension between the brothers. When Elijah married at age twenty-one, Ethan made an oblique reference to visits to the quarters that he imagined the new husband would have to manage more discreetly in the future.
Teddy’s face flushed. He glanced despairingly at Geoffrey and then apologetically at Prudence. “I can’t read any more of this. Not out loud.”
“I can,” Prudence reassured him, reaching for the small book. “It won’t be any worse than some passages from one of Mr. Dickens’s novels.”
She continued as Teddy had begun, silently skimming whole pages, choosing a sentence or a paragraph here and there to read aloud. It was beginning to seem as though the diary would tell them nothing of what they had hoped to discover. Why then, had someone taken such care to hide it?
None of them expected the secret that Ethan confided to his most private self a little more than a year before Georgia seceded from the Union.
Her name is Selena and I have never known anyone as beautiful. She could pass for white, but she is not. She is one of us, though I do not know which Bennett man first sired her line. And therein lies the second sin. She is enslaved and the same blood that runs through my veins runs through hers.
“He writes that he has known her all her life and yet he hasn’t,” Prudence said, lowering the journal to her lap for a moment, putting into context the fragmentary entries she had just read. “It would seem that Aunt Jessa managed to protect the girl for a while by keeping her largely out of sight. She covered her straight hair with a turban and her body with the loose-fitting clothing of a much older woman. And because she became her invalid mistress’s personal body servant, even to sleeping on a pallet at the foot of her bed or outside her bedroom door at night, Selena escaped the kind of depredations other young women in the quarters were prey to.”
Geoffrey had risen to his feet as soon as Prudence stopped reading. He poured whiskey for himself and Teddy, then, at a nod from his partner, for Prudence also. She wondered if this was the scandal he had been hinting at. If so, it seemed rather tame, given what she had learned about how the Bennett family ruled its isolated kingdom. Even Teddy didn’t seem as shocked as she would have expected him to be.
“Wildacre was a much different place in the days before the war,” Teddy said, raising his glass as though to toast that never-to-be-forgotten era. “I remember how full of people it always seemed when I was a child. Relatives and family friends from other plantations often came and spent weeks with us on the island. They brought their own servants, so the quarters were full to bursting when there were guests in the Big House. My grandfather was a fierce and frightening man, but he instructed his overseer to relax some of the rules that governed the quarters whenever there were visitors. I remember not realizing until I was much older what he had meant when he said it brought new blood into the mix.”
It was a matter-of-fact statement that Prudence thought he would never have voiced if Eleanor had been there to hear it. She would have been incensed at the license to sire mulatto children on slave women helpless to resist the casual lust of a master. But Teddy sipped at his whiskey as though the journal had catapulted him from his painful present into a past where he felt more comfortably at home.
When Geoffrey sat down again and neither man said anything to break the silence, Prudence picked up the journal and continued reading aloud. Gradually it became clear that Ethan Bennett and the slave Selena chose to delud
e themselves into believing their stolen time together went unnoticed. Aunt Jessa had taught her how to read and write, a crime in itself, and she encouraged the girl to mimic the speech of the white family she served.
It was a dangerous game the two young people played, but as Prudence read each revealing entry, it became apparent that they got away with it for nearly a year. Then Selena found herself in the family way, and nothing could be hidden any longer.
My father has stipulated that she is to occupy a small cabin at the far end of the row, and that she is no longer to show herself in the Big House. The child, if it lives, will be sold off the place as soon as it is weaned. As will she. I have begun to plan their escape.
“Hopeless,” Teddy said. “It could never be done.”
“Yet Queen Lula named Selena as the only runaway who was never found or brought back to Wildacre,” Prudence reminded him.
“Because she died in the swamp,” Teddy maintained.
“Perhaps not.” It was the voice Prudence had heard Geoffrey use in court when it was time to focus a jury’s attention on the turning point of a case.
It seemed inconceivable, but Teddy did not appear to have connected long-ago Selena and the Eleanor he had hoped to marry. He was reacting to the unfolding story as though it were entirely the tale of his uncle’s doomed love. Nothing to do with him at all.
I have found someone who will take her North for me. It will have to be soon because I fear war may be coming. If the man from Illinois is elected, the South will not remain in the Union. If, God willing, he is defeated, I must still see her and my unborn child to safety. They cannot live where I am unable to protect them.
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