Woman Without a Past

by Whitney, Phyllis A. ;

  Charles drove slowly, pointing out houses of special interest, allowing me to rest—to simply be. When we reached the inn, he didn’t move at once to get out of the car.

  “Are you all right, Molly? I had a feeling back at the house that things were going badly for you. You mustn’t mind Valerie—she isn’t well.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Perhaps I shouldn’t stay. There are things I’d like to know, but . . . I can’t be a real daughter to Valerie, and if I stay she’ll only be hurt.”

  He said strangely, “I don’t think I can let you go now,” and then went on quickly, as though he’d said something he hadn’t meant to. “I’ll call for you around nine in the morning, if that’s all right. They serve breakfast in the lobby of the inn, if you get up early, and then we can drive out to Mountfort Hall. You can’t possibly leave before you see your family’s most prestigious ancestral home.”

  I supposed he was right, and gave in. He came around to open my door, took my hand as I got out and held it for a moment. “Thank you for coming, Molly. I know it hasn’t been easy. Valerie is emotionally fragile—even more so than Amelia—and you must be gentle with her. She wasn’t always like this. I can remember her when I was a young boy—a happy, spirited lady. The loss of you, coupled with your father’s death, has made it hard for her.”

  Unexpected emotion that had nothing to do with Valerie Mountfort choked me. “I was stolen as a baby! I was taken away from my family—a horrible crime. Kidnapped! I want to know how it happened. I must know how it happened. I must know! Before I leave I have to know!”

  I must have startled him, but he spoke quietly. “I was only a boy at the time, Molly, but I remember a little from hearing people talk.”

  “Where was I when I was taken?”

  “You were in the upstairs sitting room of the house we were just in.”

  “That’s what Amelia meant when she said the last time we were together was in that room. Somehow I had a sense—a feeling—about the room that I can’t name. What else do you know?”

  “You and Amelia were playing together on a blanket spread on the floor of the sitting room. Your nurse was there. Later, of course, they relieved her of her duties for not taking good care of you. Someone came into the house, wrapped you up in that very blanket, and carried you away, leaving Amelia behind. I don’t know why they didn’t take both babies. Valerie was upstairs. She beard Amelia screaming and came down to find that one of her daughters was gone, and the nurse, who had been put out with ether, tied up in another room. It must have been a nightmare. Simon rushed home from his office, and the police were summoned—with no results whatsoever. No one had a clue as to your whereabouts until I walked into Hillyard’s waiting room and saw you there. Thank God I did!”

  “I’m not sure I can thank anyone. Perhaps I’ve only brought more trouble and grief.”

  Even as I spoke the words, I wondered what I meant. I couldn’t explain them, even to myself. Amelia hadn’t reacted as Valerie had. I told Charles good night and went quickly up the steps into the entry hall of the inn. When I reached the lobby, I stood for a moment looking up into that eerie, cavernous space. Irregular beams rimmed the open area, all shadowy in spite of lights set in the faraway ceiling. At least no one peered down at me tonight from some high railing.

  In the elevator I pushed the button for the third floor. A narrow length of hall led to my room, and I hurried to close myself away from those empty spaces above the lobby. When I reached the bedroom, I turned on several lamps and then stood at a window to look out over the rooftops of Charleston. Yet all I could see in my mind’s eye was the room with the primrose carpet and pale walls.

  What was it in that room that had so moved me? Something had seemed to reach into the past—to have been a part of the terror of being snatched up in rough hands and spirited away. Did anyone really know what sensory memories might impress themselves upon us when we were babies, and leave a residue that could surface years later?

  The ringing of a telephone startled me, and I lifted the receiver to hear Honoria’s voice. “I must see you soon, Molly. I’ll drive out to the plantation tomorrow, since I understand you’ll be there. We’ll find a way to talk—alone. Terrible things have happened in the past. At first I only wanted you to leave, but now I’ve been told that you must stay. Tonight I sensed very strongly that you are the instrument I’ve waited for all these years. Besides, I have a letter for you, and you must see it soon.

  “You must stay, you know. You haven’t any choice. The road has opened and you must take it. In the meantime I want you to sleep well tonight—with no disturbing dreams. I left some comfrey tea for you, with a touch of my own herbs in the packet. Make yourself a tisane and be peaceful, Molly. You are very tired and you will sleep.”

  The very quality of Honoria’s voice quieted me, and when I hung up I made myself a cup of the tea she’d left me. Sleep came quickly, with no dreams that I remembered when I awoke refreshed in the morning.

  Today I would begin my search for the “truth,” whatever it might be. Honoria had been “told” that I must stay, and for the moment I would accept that. There would be a way—an opening through which I could step—and I must watch for it. Perhaps something of Honoria’s hypnotic influence had lasted through the night, and whatever guidance she offered me, I would use.

  The early-morning sunlight streamed through my windows, and last night’s alarms and fears seemed almost silly now. I could look forward to my visit to the plantation and to being with Charles again. My sister valued him, and I must too. Most of all, a sense of this sister to whom I was already drawn strengthened me and lifted my spirits. I didn’t need the imaginary “Polly” of my childhood anymore. Later today I would meet my real sister again, and how could I not be happy? I put aside the thought of Valerie and her disturbing behavior.

  For a few moments longer I lay in bed, looking about with more interest than I’d felt last night. One side of the bedroom had been stripped to original bare brick, and the walls were thick, as evidenced by the deep recesses of the windows. In one corner a tall strip of wooden post had been left exposed, and these touches gave one a sense of the past and the very old.

  When I’d showered and dressed in fawn slacks and a pale yellow blouse with an embroidered yoke, I stood before the full-length bathroom mirror, looking for some identifiable change in myself. Except for my shorter hair, curling in just above my shoulders, I was looking at Amelia Mountfort, and that fact made me somehow uncertain. I didn’t really know this woman who had my face, my body. Today I didn’t bother to put on a matching bandeau.

  Only a few guests were in the lobby when I went down to breakfast. I helped myself to toast and coffee and a slice of melon, and as I ate I refrained from looking up into the dusky reaches overhead. I wanted nothing to blight my spirits this morning.

  Charles was prompt and arrived just as I finished eating. He approved of my appearance—“You even like the same colors that Amelia likes,” he marveled. “She wears that same shade of yellow. But there’s a difference. I’d never confuse the two of you.”

  That reassured me a little—I felt a desperate need to hold on to my own identity.

  We walked down to Charles’s car, parked at the curb, and as I got in I wondered if I should tell him about Honoria’s call last night. Quickly intuiting that it might be a disturbing element to introduce, I decided against it. I wanted to enjoy everything about this trip to Mountfort Hall.

  “We’re going south first,” Charles told me as we moved into traffic. “It’s only a little out of our way. You haven’t seen the lower tip of the peninsula yet.”

  We followed East Bay Street to the Battery, where we got out of the car and climbed up on the wall. A breeze blew in from the water, still fresh in the warming morning.

  Charles pointed. “There it is out there—Fort Sumter. It’s only a sandy rise above the water. That’s
where all the trouble started—because of Lincoln’s perfidious strategy. Charleston is where the curtain rose, but the stage directions were coming from Montgomery, the capital of the Confederacy, and most of all, from Washington. It’s pretty clear that Lincoln forced the South to fire the first shot. He wanted to enter the War with the Union seemingly blameless.”

  I had a different view of Lincoln, but I said nothing and Charles went on.

  “When the battle began, the people of Charleston climbed to their rooftops to watch—until the shells came too close for comfort. It was only then that they realized that a real war had started.”

  Old passions, the history of an entire people, were close to the surface in his voice, and I listened in amazement. In the South the effects of a terrible war that should never have been fought were still too recent to be forgotten. Charleston walls still bore the marks of shelling. Plantation houses had been looted and burned. An entire people had been impoverished. The stories were still handed down from grandmother to granddaughter, from father to son. I could only feel that war itself was to blame—strange means of settling arguments that men still seemed to accept as natural.

  “Where do I belong?” I asked ruefully. “I’ve grown up away from all this. It has nothing to do with me.”

  “Blood matters,” Charles told me. “You are a member of this family.” Something in his voice quickened. “I wish I could have lived in Charleston before the War. It was a lively, exciting city, and there’s still nothing we like better than a good party. They say wonderful parties and balls were held out at the old plantations—before everything fell apart.”

  I stared out across the busy harbor at the tiny rise of the fort above the water. Charles’s fervor was something I might use in a story, but I would not be otherwise beguiled by it. I knew who I was.

  “General Beauregard was part of all that,” Charles went on. “He came from Louisiana, but he was the Confederate hero at Fort Sumter. Charleston ladies adored him and made him their ideal of a soldier.”

  I felt as though I had somehow stepped into the pages of Gone with the Wind, yet all this had really happened. This was bloody ground where history had been lived by men and women, some of whom might have been my ancestors.

  “Sumter belongs to one war,” Charles said more quietly. “But Fort Moultrie is our Revolutionary fort. They both guard our harbor. I just wanted you to have a sense of the city’s past, Molly, before I take you out to find your own.”

  We drove up through North Charleston to where great bridge spans crossed strips of water in what seemed a confusing maze— one over the Ashley River, one over the Cooper, with more bridges reaching out to the Sea Islands, sometimes in the path of hurricanes.

  “Since our rivers were the highways to Charleston in the early days, the great plantations were built near the water,” Charles told me. “Only Drayton Hall and Mountfort Hall remain on the Ashley today.”

  By car, the trip to the plantation took no more than a half hour, and the highway ran unnotably through this Low Country. Charles turned down a side road leading toward the river.

  “My mother’s family was made destitute by the War, as the Mountforts were for a time. The two families were friends and she was invited to their home often as a young girl. That’s how she met my father, since he worked for the plantation. Of course, people thought it was an unsuitable marriage—a young woman of a good family and a bricklayer—but my mother did as she liked, just as her friend Valerie Mountfort did. So when a head housekeeper was needed, my mother insisted she was right for the job, and she’s worked there happily since I was a little boy.”

  Again we turned off the main road, this time onto a wide driveway with moss-hung live oaks reaching their branches across to meet overhead. A picture I’d seen in a dozen movies.

  Charles was still speaking of his mother, and he laughed softly. “Valerie and Evaline ran off together on some escapade one time, when they’d had too much Mountfort discipline. Of course, they were brought back chastened and never broke away again. I wish I could have known them in those days.”

  I hardly listened, my attention riveted to the long avenue of beautiful, arching trees. An excitement of recognition—of the spirit?—filled me.

  “The slave cabins were over on the left,” Charles said. “My father restored the only one left and turned it into a comfortable cottage, where we lived. And where my mother still lives. In the old days slaves were kept away from the main house at night, and plantation owners took care that the people who worked for one household did not grow chummy with those of another. In spite of the luxury and wealth that slaves afforded them, families were uneasy at times. Revolts like those in the West Indies might break out here, so it wasn’t always a comfortable life.”

  Charles’s home was a small, charming cottage. A rose garden had been planted under the white frames of windows set into the original brick—bricks that had faded to a soft, dusty pink that glowed softly in sunlight.

  “We have quite a few visitors at certain times of the year. You can see one of the demonstration sheds over there.” Charles pointed. “Local craftspeople make pottery, candles, do weaving and basketmaking. You can visit it whenever you like. But first we meet my mother. She’s probably waiting at the house for us. Look—there ahead!”

  The driveway curved, and now I could see Mountfort Hall looming at the far end. Set squarely across the end of the driveway, it had been built before the Greek Revival movement—a great structure of rosy brick, with a high basement and noble Palladian portico two stories high. A doorway, Charles said, that was one of the earliest of its kind in the country. Wide steps climbed on either side, meeting at a landing behind which were the slim white columns of a recessed porch. Duplicate columns on the level above supported the small peak of a frontal roof, separated from the larger roof rising behind.

  “This is really the back of the house,” Charles said. “The front has twin flights of steps and faces on the river, where guests once approached by boat. The rise of the ground here protects the house from flooding. That corner of the structure was shelled during the War, though the rest escaped damage. I think I may have told you that when Porter had it restored, my father matched the old bricks that had been made here on the plantation, using the same clay.”

  I liked the pride in his voice when he spoke of his father. “Did any of your family fight in the War?”

  “Several died. One great-grandfather was a foot soldier. He was killed at Gettysburg—a long way from home.”

  As we left Charles’s car and walked toward the house, a woman came through the high doorway above us to stand in the portico. Charles waved to his mother, and she bowed courteously toward me—a hostess welcoming a guest.

  Evaline Landry was an impressive figure, standing high above us—tall and straight, her graying hair combed simply back with no part. She resembled her son, though with a stronger, more determined cast of features. Her dress of silky gray cotton had been cut severely, so that it just missed being a uniform, her one decoration a long chain of gold, silver, and gunmetal beads that hung nearly to her waist.

  As I came up the right wing of steps, she held out her hand to clasp mine, and her dark eyes examined me gravely. “Yes,” she said, deciding quickly, “there’s no mistaking the likeness.”

  Charles kissed his mother’s cheek. “Just don’t call her Cecelia. This is Molly Hunt, Mother. Molly, this is my mother, Mrs. Evaline Landry.”

  Mrs. Landry smiled rather coolly, as though she measured me in some way. “My son didn’t mention whether you are to stay with us. There is plenty of space, of course, and a guest room is always ready.”

  “Thank you,” I said, “but I’ll be returning to Charleston for the night.”

  Again she bowed to my decision, but I couldn’t tell whether I was good or bad news to Evaline Landry. She obviously belonged as much to Mountfort Hall as any of the family
, and even as she admitted my likeness to Amelia, I suspected that she would wait for her lead from Porter Phelps, who undoubtedly made all decisions out here.

  She gestured us inside. “May I show you a little of the house, Miss Hunt?”

  I sensed Charles relax, as though his mother’s acceptance was a relief to him.

  We entered a hall carpeted in a neutral color, which led straight through to doors on the river side. I glimpsed the shrubbery on far green banks and could see the water through glass doors at the far end.

  Mrs. Landry took us first into a splendid drawing room, where two crystal chandeliers hung from plaster carvings on the ceiling. A huge floor-to-ceiling mirror, the frame heavy with ornate gilt, reflected the room at one end, making it seem even larger. At the opposite end stood a fireplace of veined white marble. It was the portrait above the mantel, however, that held my attention.

  The subject was a handsome, commanding man in the British dress of Revolutionary times. Perhaps it had been painted before the colonies had rebelled. Strangely, he had chosen to be seated at the entrance to what might have been a Greek temple.

  Mrs. Landry spoke respectfully. “That is Edward Mountfort, who built this house. Your ancestor, Miss Hunt.”

  I returned the portrait’s rather challenging look, and found a certain amusement in the eyes. Did the old boy find humor in my presence here?

  “He must have been a colorful fellow,” Charles said. “Amelia always talks to him when she comes out. He fought a duel in his late sixties, at an age when he had no business taking on a younger man. They fought out there on the lawn, where we just came in, and old Edward died of his wounds. Amelia has adapted bits and pieces of all that in the play we’re doing, though of course she’s moved the action up to the War Against Northern Invasion.”

  I bristled a little, and caught Charles’s smile and knew that he was deliberately baiting me—the Yankee visitor.

  He went on. “In the play Garrett Burke, whom you met yesterday in Daphne’s shop, and I are supposed to fight that duel. Though Garrett is no Edward Mountfort, and neither am I. Mother, is Garrett working here today?”