Bon Marche

by Chet Hagan

  She turned in the saddle, pointing down the wooded road leading into Bon Marché. She was beaming, proud of the service she had performed.

  Charles helped her to dismount. “Didn’t anyone ever teach you not to run a horse like that?” The remonstrance was mild, however, and was followed by a kiss.

  “I think I’m as excited as you must be! Your horses are here!”

  “How do they look?”

  A frown. “I don’t know, Charles. I’m not an expert on horses.”

  They stood together looking down the broad lane. A minute. Two minutes. Three. Charles shifted nervously from one foot to another.

  Then, when he saw the Fortunata party coming out of the woods, Charles ran forward to embrace Malachi, the loyal old black man. “Thank God you’ve made it!”

  “Yas, suh. We all mighty glad to be here, Mistah Charles.”

  Dewey stood silently as the horses were herded past him, counting them and clapping the other blacks on the back as they came by him.

  Abner Lower, mounted and looking very weary, brought up the rear. When he came abreast of Charles, he slid to the ground and gave him a clumsy salute.

  “Mr. Dewey—your horses.”

  “My God, Lower, they look … well, all wrung out!”

  “Yes, sir. It was a difficult trip.”

  “I counted only twenty-five.”

  “Yes, sir. We lost three.” He told him of the episode with the mare Estella and her foal. “And just two days ago, that two-year-old, Virginia Song, stepped in a chuckhole and broke his right fore. I’m sorry, Mr. Dewey, but I had to destroy him.”

  Charles groaned. He really wanted to weep. “Virginia Song? I had great hopes for him.”

  The hunter-guide nodded.

  A forced smile. “Well, Lower, it’s good to see you, nevertheless. I imagine it could have been worse.”

  “It could have been,” Lower agreed. “To be truthful, I didn’t realize how slow it would be, driving that many horses.”

  “Hmmm. I can appreciate the difficulties, believe me.”

  Dewey shouted to Malachi. “Put the mares and foals in that pasture to your left. The horses in training on your right. And take the stallions directly to the barn. Horace will show you the way.”

  Lower went to his saddlebag and took out the log book listing the horses. He handed it and another package to Charles.

  “MacCallum sent these along. The larger package, he said, is the latest English Stud Book.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Lower.” Charles shook his hand. “I know you must be tired and hungry. We have food prepared—”

  “I just want to sleep.”

  “Of course.”

  As they walked toward the log houses, Dewey asked: “The slaves? They gave you no trouble?”

  “No, sir.” He hesitated, choosing his words carefully. “They … uh … well, dammit, Mr. Dewey, they love you.”

  II

  LATE that night Charles sat in the light of an oil lamp, studying the log book of the horses. Mattie was quietly by his side.

  He wrote a note in the book. “Note this date,” he said to her. “August 10, 1797—the real beginning of Bon Marché.”

  “It’s noted.”

  Charles repeated the date. “A beginning with twenty-five horses. Five stallions, seven horses in training, and ten mares, three with foals by their sides.”

  “You’re pleased, aren’t you?”

  “Yes. I believe them to be the finest blooded horses in western Tennessee.” He paused. “Or, I guess I should say thoroughbreds. I noted in the English Stud Book that Andrew sent along that that’s the universally accepted term now—thoroughbred.”

  Mattie made no comment.

  Charles smiled. “Thoroughbred? Andrew had an old English dictionary at Elkwood, when he was tutoring me, in which thoroughbred meant a well-bred or thoroughly trained person. But I think the term is well applied to our blooded horses. Thoroughbred. I like that—it has a good ring to it.

  “I have five of the best stallions in this area,” Charles went on. “Premier Etoile, a son of Skullduggery, by Yorick. Lord, Marshall Statler was proud of old Skull. And he allowed me to name Premier Etoile, you know.” He laughed. “But of course, you don’t know. I have so much still to tell you.” Dewey leaned over and kissed her. “So much to tell you.”

  She smiled at him.

  “Then there’s Predator, by Shark, and Arrangement, by Medley—I had a role in importing both Medley and Shark.” He paused in thought. “In ‘84 and ‘86, if my memory serves me.

  “And New York, by Messenger.” A grin. “Mattie, I actually sent mares all the way to New York to breed to that stallion. He’s a bit small, but sturdy. The Messenger blood lines may yet be important. And, finally, Cranium, also by Skullduggery.”

  He sighed. “Skull’s last foal colt. Not much at the track, but Martha was particularly fond of that one. I guess it’s the reason I kept him. Oh, hell, Mattie, I must be boring you to death.”

  “You’re not,” she told him.

  “It’s late, isn’t it?”

  “Hmmm.”

  “I wonder what your mother is going to say about you staying out here tonight?”

  “Do you care?”

  “Yes, I care. She’s bound to be unhappy with both of us.”

  Mattie shrugged. “I don’t care.” A deep breath. “It is late, Charles, but could we talk?”

  “Certainly.”

  “I watched you carefully today with the horses, and for the first time, I realized what Bon Marché means to you. Angelica was with me, and she said something I haven’t been able to dismiss. She said, ‘He needs you, Miss Mattie. He can’t do it without you.’ Do you think that’s true?”

  “Angelica is a wise woman.”

  “And she loves you deeply. She makes me feel inadequate in that department. I’m not sure, Charles, that I love you as she does.”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “No, it’s true. I admire you; you know that. But love is something else again. Yet when she said, ‘He can’t do it without you,’ I knew she was speaking the truth. You need me, Charles, for my strength—”

  “I do. And—”

  She silenced him by putting her fingers to his lips. “Bon Marché needs more than a horseman. It needs someone to manage it, to make it grow, while you care for the horse business. If you’ll take me on those terms, Charles, I’ll marry you.”

  Delighted, he tried to kiss her, but she moved away from him.

  “Will you take me on those terms?”

  “Yes.”

  “Knowing that love is not yet there?”

  “On any terms.”

  She kissed him, sealing the bargain. And she laughed. “After a good night’s sleep—if that’s possible with us—I’ll ride to Nashville and tell Mother.”

  “You want me to go with you?”

  “No, you have work here. I’ll take care of Mother. I’ll also have Father put in an order for sawmill equipment.”

  “Sawmill?”

  “To cut the lumber to build the Bon Marché mansion. The best damned house this wilderness has ever seen!”

  III

  MATTIE’S news of her decision to marry Charles Dewey did not produce the anticipated rage in her mother. Instead, Mrs. Jackson accepted it calmly, with even a small measure of cheer, immediately setting about making plans for the ceremony.

  Sarah ordered her own wedding gown of lace and silk removed from the huge trunk and altered to fit Mattie. She rented Mr. Parker’s large parlor in the Nashville Inn for the occasion. And she ordered her husband to find champagne somewhere and have it brought to Nashville. It turned out that St. Louis was the nearest source of champagne—of whatever quality—and two riders were dispatched to fetch it.

  A date was set—August 30.

  Most troublesome in the planning was finding someone to perform the ceremony. Nashville was devoid of churches and ministers. Itinerant preacher Brother John wasn’t considered by Sar
ah to be proper, but he wasn’t in evidence anyway, busy wih his own saving of souls somewhere on the Natchez Trace. In the end, Superior Court Judge John McNairy—who was due to be in the community for a court session—made his services available.

  Sarah had several disappointments. She sought a decorator to turn Mr. Parker’s parlor into a wedding chapel. The closest such gentleman was found to be in distant Philadelphia; Mrs. Jackson decided to do the decorating herself. A professsional chef was not available either, but Sarah finally accepted Mr. Parker’s assurances that the Nashville Inn cooks were equal to the important task of providing a sumptuous wedding dinner.

  If Mattie was happy about her mother’s sudden change of attitude, James Jackson was ecstatic. With tears in his eyes, he said to his daughter: “Your mother is a fine woman. I knew that when you decided to marry, she’d come around.” He swallowed hard. “I’ve always loved her, Mattie, but now I can’t express to you how deep that love has become.”

  IV

  EVERYONE in the Nashville environs was invited to the wedding: the merchants, the tavern owners, the buckskin-clad hunters, the Indian traders, the gamblers, the rough denizens of the cockpit, the frontier entrepreneurs. Not the blacks, of course.

  And everyone came.

  Guest of honor was the Honorable Andrew Jackson, Senator of the United States of America, properly dignified in breeches and a somber black coat with a velvet collar. Accompanied by his shy, quiet-spoken wife, Rachel, Mattie’s “Cousin Andy” signed the marraige document as an “official witness.”

  It was a gay scene in the Nashville Inn parlor, made more so after the dinner—Sarah deemed it adequate fare, still wishing she had been able to find a proper chef—by two frontiersmen who broke out fiddles, leading to impromptu dancing.

  The champagne disappeared quickly, but other spirits provided lavishly by Mr. Parker kept the wedding party alive. More than a few were taken drunk.

  Mattie and Charles stood in a corner of the room, accepting the congratulations of the guests.

  Senator Jackson came up to them. “Are you two planning a honeymoon?”

  “A few days alone,” Charles answered, “not a formal honeymoon. We’re just going to ride out and lose ourselves for a time.”

  Andy nodded soberly. “A wise move. Being alone with the one you love, you will find, is often difficult. I myself find that a great luxury, what with my many responsibilities.” He sighed. “Too many responsibilities, perhaps.”

  “Do you have to accept them all?” Charles asked.

  “Someone must, sir, someone must.”

  Jackson drifted away to talk to others and, in a short time, left the inn. No one else seemed to. The revelry went on unabated.

  Mattie nudged Dewey, inclining her head toward her mother, who could be seen in earnest conversation with the long-hunter, Abner Lower.

  “That’s an unlikely pairing,” she said.

  “Hmmm. Perhaps your mother has decided to make her peace with this ungodly wilderness.” He laughed.

  “For Father’s sake,” his wife replied, “I hope so.”

  V

  JAMES Jackson awoke, squinting in the sunshine streaming through the window, his head aching mightily from the combination of too much champagne and too much bourbon. He groaned with the pain, but he was happy. Content. The wedding had been everything he had hoped for and more.

  His wife wasn’t in the bed, but he heard noises in the attic above him.

  “Sarah!” he called out. “Is that you up there?”

  “It is.”

  “What in God’s name are you doing in the attic?”

  “I’m packing, James.”

  Perplexed, he sat up in bed. “Packing what?”

  “My clothing, my belongings.” She sounded perfectly calm.

  James swung his feet out of the bed, wincing at the shooting pains in his head. Pulling on his boots, he made his way up the narrow stairway to the attic.

  “Sarah, what the devil—”

  She stopped in her work, turning toward him. She was smiling. “I’m packing to leave, James,” Sarah said calmly.

  He just stared at her.

  Only after she went back to stuffing her clothing in several large carpetbags did he find words.

  “Leave? What does that mean?”

  “It means what it has always meant. I’m going east, within the hour.”

  “Are you mad?”

  “No, I’m perfectly sane, James. I’ve done everything I can do here. I stayed by your side until you established your business. I married off your daughter. Now I’m going to do what I want to do.”

  “But … where will you go?” he sputtered.

  “To Philadelphia. To civilization. I plan to live with my sister.”

  “Philadelphia! How do you expect to make that trip alone?”

  “Charles’s guide, Mr. Lower, is returning to Virginia, he’s agreed to allow me to accompany him to Charlottesville, where I’ll be able to find a coach to Philadelphia.”

  James found comprehension difficult. “I don’t … understand this sudden desire to—”

  “Sudden?” Her calmness evaporated. “Sudden, you say! I’ve been pleading with you for years to take me out of this hellhole! Years! You never have. You never will. And now that Mattie has also made her decision to stay—”

  “I won’t allow it!”

  Her face grew hard. “And I won’t allow you to keep me here another minute longer!”

  “But you’re my wife.”

  “I’ll remedy that when I get to Philadelphia.” She grinned at him wickedly. “I’m sure you’ll be able to find an accommodating woman—”

  “But I love you!” he protested.

  Her sarcastic laughter cut through him like a knife, bringing new pain to his head. James Jackson sank to the floor, defeated.

  As she hefted the two large carpetbags, moving toward the door with them, he asked: “If you have no love for me, think of your daughter. What of Mattie?”

  “What of Mattie?” she repeated, pondering the question. Sarah struggled through the door with the bags.

  “Like you, James,” she said over her shoulder, “Mattie can go to hell!”

  23

  IT was a hot evening, as only a late summer evening can be when the moon seems to reflect the heat of the departed sun. They lay contentedly on their backs under a canopy of red cedar. Alone, even though they were less than fifteen miles removed from Bon Marché.

  “Charles?” Mattie whispered.

  “Hmmm.”

  “How long will this last?”

  “As long as that moon persists.” He pointed upward.

  “No, be serious,” she said with mild annoyance. “This is all new to me, but you’ve been married before. Do the pleasures of being together … well, do they last?”

  “If we permit them to last.”

  “It’s as simple as that?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Lord, I hope so.” Mattie giggled. “I do enjoy it so—making love to you!”

  Charles laughed.

  “That’s humorous to you?”

  “No, no.” He turned on his side, leaning on an elbow, looking down into her face. “When I was being tutored by Andrew MacCallum, one of the things he insisted on was the memorization of passages from certain classical writings. Shakespeare was a particular favorite of his. And, I just remembered one of those passages—“

  “Are you going to tell me what it is?”

  “Perhaps I shouldn’t.”

  “Charles!”

  “Oh, very well. Mr. Shakespeare, in writing about love, said, ‘Love is merely madness; and I tell you, deserves as well a dark horse and a whip, as madmen do; and the reason why they are not so punished and cured, is that the lunacy is so ordinary, that the whippers are in love too.’”

  Mattie joined in his laughter. “Well, if I’m to be thought mad,” she said, “I might as well prove it.” She kissed him passionately, leading to them making love
once more.

  That’s the way it had been in their four days alone in the wilderness. And, as before, the act of love led to quiet words about what they visualized for Bon Marché. In that sense, it had been a strange honeymoon: periods of intense passion followed by serious businesslike talk.

  “Your mention of Mr. MacCallum,” Mattie said, “brings to mind, Charles, that the children need a tutor.”

  “I’ll write to Andrew and see if he has a young student he might recommend.”

  “Perhaps there’s someone closer. Father has a friend in Charleston, a young man who’s trained in architecture. It occurs to me that he might be willing to come here to design our home and at the same time tutor the children.”

  “I’ll leave it to you.”

  “You’d be willing to do that?”

  “Isn’t that what you want?”

  She laughed again. “Yes.”

  “And perhaps he’ll stay around to also tutor the children we’re going to have.”

  She was silent.

  “You don’t want children of your own?”

  It was a long time before she answered. “I have five now. Six, if we count Marshall.”

  “Marshall is adequately cared for,” he snapped. “He has his own parents in Angelica and Horace.”

  “But he’s your child.”

  “Am I to be constantly reminded of that?” His anger was real.

  She kissed him lightly, but made no apologies for having brought up the subject of Charles’s half-breed baby. There were no more words. They just clung to each other in their need to be together. And they fell asleep that way on their last night in the wilderness.

  II

  BON Marché was a demanding mistress.

  It was just as well that she was. On their return to the plantation, they were greeted with the report that Mattie’s mother had left. James Jackson told the story exactly as it had unfolded.

  “She really said that?” Mattie asked incredulously. “She said I could go to hell?”

  “Yes,” her father answered sadly.

  There was a moment of silence; then Mattie just shrugged. “Father, what’s the name of that young architect in Charleston? You’ve mentioned him several times.”

  “That would be Wilbur Hopkins.”

  “Do you think he’d be willing to come here to design our home and to act as a tutor for the children?”