Eight plated the pan-seared duck breast over a swirl of fig sauce and wiped the rim of the serving dish before handing it over for Daphne to take outside. Mary carried out the soufflé, and when they had gone, Barrie leaned against the sink and watched out the window. “They’re kind of cute together—Pru and your father, I mean.”
“You’re feeling virtuous, aren’t you?” Eight dropped a kiss on the tip of Barrie’s nose.
“Well, look at her.” Barrie gestured at the starry-eyed expression still shining across Pru’s face. “How can I not be happy when she looks like that?”
“I don’t know, but you aren’t. I wish you’d tell me what’s going on.”
Barrie busied herself collecting pans and putting them in the sink to soak. “Not tonight, okay? Let’s just focus on one thing at a time.”
She waited until dinner was over, intending to speak to Seven, but he grasped her elbow as the others went back inside. Keeping her beside him, he took the plates she had stacked and set them back down on the table.
“I thought we had an agreement,” he said, his voice low with a hint of threat. “You were supposed to talk Eight out of staying here, and instead you’re making him more determined to stay and more poised for heartbreak.”
“You and I never agreed on anything. Anyway, I can ‘talk’ to him until my face turns blue, but it won’t change his mind unless I mean it.”
“You should mean it. It’s your own pain as well as his.”
“Pain like you caused Pru?” Barrie picked up a napkin and absently smoothed it flat before looking up to meet his eyes. “Were you eventually able to convince yourself that you loved Eight’s mother? Or did you just settle for second best?”
“I loved my wife, and I made her happy.”
“Which is as good as admitting you weren’t happy yourself. So how can you blame Eight for wanting what he wants? Or me? Knowing we shouldn’t be together doesn’t change the fact that we want to be.”
Seven’s lips flattened as he paused to study her. “There’s still the matter of Cassie’s hearing. I can tell the judge we object to her being in the pre-trial intervention program.”
“I’d say blackmail was beneath you,” Barrie said more calmly than she felt, “but you seem to be getting very comfortable with it. I don’t think you can really be as heartless as you seem, though. You wouldn’t put Cassie back in jail simply because I can’t convince Eight I want something I don’t actually want.”
Seven slowly rubbed his temple. “Do you have any idea what it’s like having people’s wants thrown at you day in and day out? Hundreds of wants, and everyone thinks they can’t survive without them. Fortunately, the only ones that are excrutiatingly painful are those of the people closest to me, but I can’t give everyone everything. Living with the pain of that hardens you.” He picked up the glass beside his own place setting and threw back the last of the dinner wine before he continued. “Look, all I want is for Eight to be happy, and for Pru to be happy. You and Eight going over to Colesworth Place on whatever pretext you’re giving us only makes it more difficult for me to be charitable. And the more I see you and him together, the more I realize you’re the last person he needs in his life.”
Barrie opened her mouth to defend herself, but what was the point? Anyway, starting any kind of a conversation with Seven that could lead to what was going on at the dig would only guarantee disaster.
Maybe Cassie and Seven weren’t all that different.
“You’re still using your own experiences and emotions to justify ignoring what Eight wants. That only hurts you both,” she said. “You have to be honest with Eight. Let him make his own choices. Either you tell him, or I will. Keeping this secret isn’t fair, and whatever you say, I don’t intend to give him up.”
She felt brave once she’d said that, but later that night, lying on her bed with the covers thrown back and the open balcony door creaking gently in the mild night breeze, she wasn’t so sure she hadn’t made another mistake. She still had little confidence that Seven would come clean, and giving him another opportunity to tell Eight himself just added another day of delay. Unable to sleep anyway, she retrieved her laptop and clicked in the USB drive with Caroline Colesworth’s diary. She couldn’t help thinking Cassie and Seven were not so different in many ways. Both were such a mess of contradictions, it almost made more sense to believe their toughness, their callousness, was just an act.
In Cassie’s case, if you took that out, and threw in the curse on top of it, what was left? A scared girl trying to find her way out of the mess her family had created for her.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
There was a certain illicit pleasure in seeing the early entries that Caroline Colesworth, aged fifteen and a half, had begun in 1864. Barrie had never kept a diary herself, and as she scrolled through the start of the scanned pages of beautifully neat handwriting, she couldn’t help comparing it to the painful, hesitant script in Lula’s letters. It made her feel guilty, and cowardly, for not having made herself read those yet. Other people’s truths were always easier than one’s own.
Monday, December 26, 1864
There was scarce anything to celebrate this Christmas, but Mama did her best. Papa gave Charlotte a new silk dress, but Charlotte told me in private that she would have sooner had shoes for our poor soldiers, who, as James writes her, must daily march many weary miles on nothing but holes strung together with occasional strips of leather. She is a different Charlotte since James left to join his uncle’s First South Carolina regiment. Of course, I am also changed.
It is a relief to finally confess it. Mama says a diary is the place to write all the small griefs and follies you cannot tell another soul. I imagine she writes of Papa’s drinking and her worries, which Charlotte and I are not meant to know about, but many are the nights I watch from the upstairs landing as he comes home late and stumbling long after Mama has retired to bed.
I miss James, and I worry for him nearly as much as Charlotte does, although I cannot say so to anyone outside these pages. I know it is wrong to love my sister’s beau, but I can’t help it. We have heard nothing from James since Sherman presented Savannah to Lincoln as a Christmas gift. Papa urges us to go to our aunt Maddy’s now that the vandal has South Carolina in his sights. The neighbors all flee, but Charlotte promised James she would be waiting here until he returned for her, and Charlotte has never broken a promise yet.
Thursday, December 29, 1864
Charlotte has cried herself into a fever, and Daphne and I have spent the better part of the past days sitting at her bedside while Mama and Mary tend to the house and help with the livestock. There is scarcely anyone left to work, and Papa was gone again the entire day yesterday. Even once he did return, he busied himself with something in the cellar instead of doing anything useful.
The long day had taken a toll, and the small letters of Caroline’s narrative began to blur together. To save time, Barrie skimmed the remaining passages instead of reading carefully. There was no reference to the events she was searching for, though. Following the date of the fire, there were only descriptions of the burned-out mansion, and notes about Caroline going to stay with her cousin Ashley in Charleston, and pages and pages about the search for Charlotte. And then, at last:
Monday, February 12, 1866
I have not had the words yet to write of what happened. I continued hoping that somehow Charlotte would find her way back to us, that Mary and the others would bring her back.
Papa swore the Federals would leave the house alone so long as it was only women inside. He said the only danger would be to Charlotte, so she would have to hide. He took Mary and the few remaining field slaves away to wait, leaving only Daphne to stay with us. But the officer—one of the deserters and certainly no gentleman—was relentless in asking Mama where we had hidden the gold. I could not think what gold he meant, so when he threatened harm to Daphne, I could not stay silent. I told them I had seen Papa in the cellar! Had Mama told me about t
he tunnel where Papa had been storing things, I would have kept silent, but I knew nothing until she whispered into my ear.
The Federals had searched and returned empty-handed, angrier than before. Since they said nothing of Charlotte, Mary, Jackson, or any of the others, I had hope that everyone must have reached safety and continued running. Jackson and Mary turned up a while later, claiming they’d never had Charlotte with them, but we’ve searched the tunnels and woods a hundred times since for clues. I can’t help thinking Charlotte would have been safe if Papa had only left her with us instead of sending her away. If she is alive somewhere, I pray she will yet find her way back to us.
I cannot bear to write of Mama and Papa. My heart has no words for such rage or sorrow.
Barrie set the computer down. Choking on tears, she went to the desk to get a tissue to blow her nose. It seemed obvious now that she’d read the entry, but not knowing that Caroline had even existed until Andrew had mentioned her, Barrie had believed it had been Charlotte with the slave girl and the woman the night the mansion had burned. Since the two girls had survived the fire, she had assumed something else had happened to them later that night, that somehow they had disappeared.
But it had been Caroline who survived. What had happened to Charlotte?
The answer was obvious, now that Barrie knew who the girls had been.
Charlotte had never gone out through the tunnel with the slaves, and Alcee had never placed his stolen treasure in the tunnel. He’d built a separate treasure room that no one had known about, and that was where he’d hidden everything he’d thought the Yankees would most likely want to steal.
No wonder the spirits of Alcee and his wife had been trying to reach the buried room beside the basement. And no wonder Barrie had been convinced all along that what was lost in that room was more valuable than gold.
Snapping the laptop closed, Barrie tried to think through what that said about Obadiah’s motives. About what he was after, and who he was. To whom he was related.
She opened the laptop again. It wasn’t cheating, exactly. Flipping to the end of a book was fully justified when not knowing the ending made sleep impossible.
Saturday, July 28, 1866
Today, James showed me the sketch of the angel he ordered to guard Charlotte’s empty grave. It is beautiful and angry, just as he is himself. He asked me for the hundredth time why we stayed even when we knew the Federals were coming. I still cannot bear to tell him Charlotte refused to leave because she had promised to wait for him. Oh, the argument when she told Mama and Papa for the third time that she wouldn’t go! But they gave in to her, as they always did. She stayed and so Mama and I stayed as well.
I told James instead that Papa would have sooner been damned than leave while the Watsons and the Beauforts stayed. I said it was the curse that caused it all, and maybe it was.
I can still scarce believe that I shall marry James tomorrow. I tell myself that I am doing it for Charlotte’s sake, that she would have wanted me to try to make him happy. But I shall never be the most beautiful girl in three counties the way she was, and James will never love me with the passion he had for her. That sort of love comes along once in a lifetime, I am convinced.
Barrie set the laptop on the desk. She moved to the window and stood looking across the river. Ragged clouds drifted across the moon in much the same way that tattered thoughts and emotions were chasing themselves through her consciousness.
She considered what to do. If Charlotte was in the buried room, the archaeologists couldn’t be allowed to break through the ceiling unaware that she was down there. Barrie had to talk to them.
And there was also Obadiah.
She hadn’t given much thought to what he planned to do with the gold or how he had planned to get it. Since she hadn’t believed it was in the buried room, it hadn’t mattered. But eight million dollars was a lot of motive.
Not just for Obadiah. For anyone.
Where were the two men who had stood beside the slave cabin watching the excavations? Who were they?
Barrie needed to talk to both Cassie and Obadiah.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
After spending most of the night tossing impatiently, Barrie was coming out of the shower when Pru knocked on her door early the next morning.
“Could you be ready in half an hour?” Pru poked her head into the room. “I’ve taken care of the horses already, so I thought we could stop at the restaurant supply in Charleston before we take the list and photographs to the auction house. Mary says we’re going to need some bigger warming trays, and I’ve got an address for a place that sells velvet ropes to keep people from straying off the path in the garden. What do you think?”
“I think the ropes will be something for the yunwi to play with,” Barrie said, smiling. “But would you mind very much if I don’t go with you?” Telling herself to be patient was like telling herself not to scratch an insistent itch. The thought of waiting most of the day to talk to Obadiah, Cassie, and the archaeologists was intolerable, and she fiddled with the dial of Mark’s watch, trying to think of an excuse.
Pru’s expression softened, and she stepped inside the room. “You want to be here when Eight gets back from Columbia, don’t you, sugar? It’s all right. I understand more than you know what that feels like.”
Somewhere in the past days Pru had found time to shop, or at least time to surf the Web, because for once her clothes looked like they’d been bought in the present century instead of the last. Barrie went and gave her an impulsive hug. “You look beautiful, Aunt Pru.”
Pru’s cheeks turned pink, but she smiled widely enough that the first faint creases came out around her eyes. She seemed to look younger every day, and happier.
She pressed her palm to Barrie’s cheek and held it there a moment. “All right. You can stay, but keep the alarm on and the doors safely locked.”
“Don’t worry about me,” Barrie said, which might, she conceded instantly, have been a bit of a tactical mistake.
Pru paused and gave her a hard appraisal. “You’re not planning on getting into any mischief, are you?”
“Of course not,” Barrie said, making a cross over her heart.
Pru held her gaze a few moments longer before she left, and Barrie waited to hear the sound of the front door closing before she pushed herself into action. After grabbing a couple of cinnamon Pop-Tarts from the kitchen cupboard and dosing herself with a strong cup of coffee, she dug out the fixings for sandwiches and found a loaf of bread in the pantry. Eight had said he would take things to Obadiah on his way to Columbia that morning, so what she was doing wasn’t strictly necessary.
Still, some extra appeasement couldn’t hurt.
After stopping briefly to retrieve the keys and a flashlight from the cupboard beneath the stairs, Barrie made her way to the unused wing upstairs and into her grandfather Emmett’s bedroom, with an escort of dubious yunwi trailing behind her. Twila’s ghost was gone, but the room still seemed cold and awful. The yunwi grew agitated when Barrie passed through and unlocked the hidden wall panel. She slid it open to reveal the secret room and the staircase that descended to the tunnel that led beneath the river.
“Stop fussing,” Barrie said. “I’ll be back soon.”
They stayed close behind her down the staircase, but hung back when she came to the iron door that had been designed to keep them out.
The tunnel looked much the same as it had when Cassie had locked Barrie and Eight inside. Seven, or someone, had left matches and a modern lighter beside the oil lantern that stood in the niche in the wall, and Barrie opted to use it to save her flashlight batteries. After a moment of hesitation, she shut the outer door and locked it. The yunwi hadn’t crossed the magical barrier by the water before, but until she knew what the Fire Carrier had been trying to tell her about them, she didn’t want to take any needless risk.
The tunnel was cold and dark. Memories swooped in like a cloud of bats, beating at her with leathered wings and sharpene
d talons. It was claustrophobic, that painful barrage, and it made her want to turn and run. She couldn’t help thinking, suddenly, of Cassie locked within her flashbacks. Shaking off the acrid taste of adrenaline, she tried to still the rapid pounding of her heart.
She hugged the wall, trailing her fingers along the bricks, concentrating on counting her footsteps, reminding herself that every stride carried her closer to the exit. Still, the memories wormed their way past her defenses. Right there in that spot, she and Eight had found the bag of silver, and there the remnants of the suitcase. Here was the place where the skeletons of Luke and Twila had lain, with Luke’s ghost forever grasping for a Twila he couldn’t find.
Barrie blinked away a wet, hot spill of pain for the lives Emmett had stolen in a fit of jealousy. And for Charlotte and James and Caroline, their lives broken by Alcee Colesworth’s greed. How could an emotion as selfless as love create so much selfish tragedy?
When Eight returned from Columbia, she would apologize to him. She would say anything she needed to say, want anything she needed to want, to give the two of them a chance to see where they could go together. If there was a lesson in the history of Watson Island, it was that people made their own curses. They didn’t need magic for that.
Shadows from the newly installed grating broke the sunlight overhead as she emerged through the renovated doorway that led into the Beaufort woods.
She paused then. Sternly, she told herself the hard part was behind her. There was no chance of running into Wyatt or Ernesto. She knew that. In the daylight, in safety, fear seemed like it should have been a conquerable thing, but it loomed larger than any iron door and slowed Barrie’s steps more than any iron grate.
She dropped the grate back into place and locked it, before weaving around the clumps of underbrush and poison ivy, avoiding rocks and fallen limbs where snakes might lurk. In less time than she would have thought, she was clear of the woods and starting up the path toward Cassie’s house.
Persuasion Page 27
