Pereira sighed. “You can’t free her, Jim.”
“I know. Not if the petition for manumission has to go to the Assembly.”
“That damnable law. They’ve never approved one.”
“They have. Just one. They freed the slave who unmasked Denmark Vesey’s plot for a slave uprising.”
“You can write it into your will, but you can’t enforce it,” Pereira reminded him.
In a brooding tone, her father said, “She’s eighteen, and she’s old enough to be married. Who will she marry?”
So he was worried about it, as much as she and her mother were.
Pereira said, “You’ve educated her beyond a marriage to a man who’s a slave.”
“There are educated men of color,” her father said.
Pereira drew in his breath in a hiss so loud that Caro could hear it in the hallway. His older brother Jacob, now dead, had remained a bachelor all his life. But he had been faithful to a free woman of color and had provided for all four children they had together. Caro knew the story well, because the woman was her mother’s estranged half sister, Maria.
Her father said, “Like Maria’s boys. How old are they now?”
Pereira said, “They’re kin to Miss Catherine, too. Certainly you could make an inquiry…send her to call on them…ask them to help.”
“Kitty is bitter against them. She won’t say why.”
Caro heard a chair creaking. Pereira must have risen. He said, “Her own notion isn’t a bad one. To go north to Ohio. If you sent her to Oberlin, she would be safe there, and she would have the society of others like herself.”
“Send her away?” her father asked.
Pereira said, “She could live as if she were free.”
Her father hesitated, and when he spoke there was a catch in his voice. “I want to keep her close just a while longer,” he said. “No wedding, and no thought of Ohio.”
The next day dawned as hot as the one before. In the dining room, on the sideboard, eggs and biscuits stayed warm in the chafing dishes, and beside them last night’s shrimp remoulade made a reappearance, having spent the night chilled in a block of ice from the ice house.
It was so hot that Caro had little appetite. She nibbled at a biscuit, buttering each bite before she ate it in the genteel manner her mother had taught her.
“James?” her mother asked, noticing that her father hadn’t eaten much, either. “Are you feeling all right?”
He smiled. He looked pale, and there were dark circles under his eyes. “Just a little headache,” he said. “It’s nothing.”
“Shall I get you a draught of laudanum?”
“No, don’t trouble yourself,” he said. “It’s nothing. The heat.” He smiled at her as he spooned eggs and shrimp onto his plate. “Don’t worry,” he assured her. “I’m all right.”
But he ate nothing, and by the end of the meal, he looked paler than before. He touched his fingers to his temple. “I believe I’ll rest for a while,” he said.
Kitty said, “I’ll make up a draught of laudanum. You go back upstairs and lie down.”
A headache might be a trifle that laudanum and a nap could treat, and it might be the first symptom of fever. Summer fever was serious. Black people usually recovered, but white people sickened and often died. Caro began to worry. She sat in the study and tried to read, but Macaulay didn’t hold her attention. Everything in the study reminded her of her father, and it increased her worry. She moved to the back parlor and tried to hem a handkerchief. Her hands shook, and she stabbed herself with the needle and soiled the cloth with a drop of blood.
Her mother found her sucking the blood from her finger. Kitty said, “Caro, don’t do that. It’s unseemly. Ask Bel to bring you a sticking plaster, and use the thimble next time.”
“How is he, Mama?”
“He’s sleeping. I hope he’s better when he wakes.”
“What if he isn’t?”
“Caro, stop it. People get headaches all the time in the heat. Don’t fret.”
“You’re worried. I can see it.”
Kitty shook her head. She had seen fever, too. “Don’t make it worse,” she said.
Despite their admonitions to each other, they worried. Every hour, Kitty ran upstairs, and every hour she reported, “He’s still asleep.” They ate a makeshift midday dinner that neither of them had an appetite for. Afterward, Kitty visited James again. She came down the stairs with an anxious expression on her face. “Tell Dulcie to make up some lavender water,” she said. “Tell her to use the ice.”
“So it is fever,” Caro said, her voice rising in alarm.
“There are all kinds of fever,” Kitty said.
“Summer fever.”
“Most recover. Both of us had it, and we recovered.”
“Fever!” Caro cried. “Why don’t we go to the pines in the sickly season? Why do we stay in the Low Country, where people get fever?”
“As though we could stay in Sumter County or in a hotel in Aiken! Lavender water,” Kitty repeated. “Tell Dulcie, and tell her not to dawdle with it.”
Caro brought a cloth and the bowl of water, icy to the touch and faintly fragrant of lavender, up the stairs, where her mother sat at her father’s bedside. The room had begun to smell of the sweat of fever. Caro handed her mother the cloth and held the bowl as Kitty dipped it into the water to bathe James’s forehead, which was greasy with sweat.
He tried to smile at the cool touch of the cloth. He said softly, “That helps me.”
“Hush,” her mother said. “Don’t tax yourself.”
He lay back on the pillows, and she draped the cloth over his forehead. “Caro?” he asked. “Will you sit with me, my love?”
“Yes, Papa.”
“Give me your hand.” He squeezed her hand with his, which seemed hot, as though his fingers were fevered, too. “It’s only a little fever. You had it. Do you remember?”
She remembered very well. She had been sick for days, her head pounding, her body burning. The doctor had come to purge her, and she was so nauseated that she needed no encouragement. She had slipped into a delirium, and through it, she had heard her mother weep and her irreligious father say, “It’s in God’s hands now, Kitty.”
“I nearly died of it!” she cried.
He winced, and she was immediately repentant. He said faintly, “Thank God you did not.”
Kitty said sharply, “Caro, that’s enough. If you can’t speak in a low voice and talk about something more cheering, I’ll send you downstairs.”
“No, let her stay,” James whispered. “It does me good, knowing that both of you are here.” He touched her cheek. “Oh, Caro,” he said. “Cara.” He had taught her a little Italian, too, and even now, the endearment stirred her.
The next morning, he was no better, and her worried mother sent for the doctor, who told them what they already knew. He recommended bleeding and an emetic. James said weakly, “Just let me rest.” Kitty sent the doctor away.
Caro rose and beckoned to her mother. In the hallway, she whispered, “He’s worse.”
“Fever is like that,” Kitty said stubbornly. “Worse before it’s better.”
Kitty spent the night at James’s bedside, refusing any help. Caro lay sleepless across the hall. She woke every hour, yanked from sleep in a sweat of fear.
At daybreak, she threw back the covers and put on her dressing gown. The door to her father’s room was ajar. Her mother had fallen asleep in the bedside chair. In sleep, she had released her grip on James’s hand, and her fingers trailed against the skirt of her dress. Her father lay under the covers, his hair damp and his long, lanky body diminished.
Caro tapped on the door, and her mother’s eyes flew open. Startled, confused, she said, “What is it?”
“How is he?” Caro whispered.
He stirred and spoke through cracked lips. “Caro? Is that you?”
“Yes, Papa.” She slipped
into the room.
With effort, he opened his eyes. His eye whites had turned yellow, the telltale sign of yellow fever. “Sit with me, Caro,” he said, his voice as cracked as his lips.
Her mother saw the yellowed eyes, and she rose, pressing her hand to her mouth to stifle a cry.
Caro said softly, “Mama, rest for a little. I’ll stay with him.”
“You’ll fetch me—”
“Yes. Mama, rest.”
As Kitty left, her father whispered, “What is it, Caro? What’s happened to make her weep so?”
“She sat with you all night. She slept in this chair. She’s tired, Papa. You rest too. Do you want anything?”
He shook his head. She reached for his hand and cradled it in her own. She thought, Not everyone dies of yellow fever. Perhaps Mama is right, and he’ll recover.
But his skin also began to yellow, another telltale that he was worse. They gave up all pretense of doing anything else and both of them stayed with him all the time, each of them holding a hand, getting up only to bathe his forehead or to run downstairs to ask Dulcie to replenish the warmed water with water newly chilled. Whenever he opened his eyes, Caro felt a stab of fear. They were the ungodly yellow of the yolk of a hardboiled egg.
When her mother descended the stairs with the water basin, Caro whispered, “Papa? Can you hear me?”
“Of course.”
“Can you forgive me for the trouble I’ve caused you?”
“You’ve never caused me trouble,” he said. “None at all.”
“For the time I argued with you about the season.” She had raged and cried about being denied a season last winter, even though she knew the reason perfectly well. He had sent her to the dressmaker for an extravagant new dress that no one would ever see besides her mother and himself.
He said, “You were so pretty in that dress.” He opened his yellowed eyes again. She bent her head and bit her lips.
He refused food, saying that he was too sick to his stomach to eat. Kitty ignored him and brought in a bowl of broth. He choked at the smell, and Caro brought the basin just in time, the pretty Meissen slop basin that ordinarily held the pitcher for his shaving water. Caro put her hand to her mouth in horror at the sight. The vomit was black with blood.
It was the worst sign, the last sign. Caro’s eyes met her mother’s, and Kitty looked away but not before the tears leaked from her eyes.
Caro removed the basin and wiped her father’s mouth. He tried to smile. “Thank you,” he whispered. He lay back on the pillow. “Stay with me, both of you.” He took their hands, one in each of his own, as he often did at the dinner table instead of saying grace. They sat by his bedside, each of them clasping the weak, paper hand. He opened his eyes, yellow swallowing up the familiar blue. He said, “I’m dying.”
In a voice thick with tears, Kitty said, “James, no.”
“Oh, beloved,” he said. He lay back on the pillows, gathering strength. He pressed their hands with a shadow of his former strength. Unable to raise his voice, he said, “I’ve tried to take care of you.”
“Yes,” Kitty said, her eyes full. “You always have.”
“To make provision for you,” he said, his voice slender as a thread.
Kitty squeezed one hand and Caro the other. Kitty nodded and let the tears slip down her face. Caro, worried for them both, stifled a sob.
They sat with him, bathing his forehead and holding his weakening hands until the fever closed his eyes and stilled his voice. They watched until his breath became shallow and listened as it turned into a rale. When it stopped, early in the morning, the room was lovely with sunlight, and the air was very still. The scent of magnolia and rot came through the open window, and the smell of fever and lavender water lingered in the room.
Still holding his hand, her mother bent over his body to kiss his lips. Her tears fell on his cheeks.
Her father, who wanted to keep her close forever, who wanted to take care of her forever, was gone. Caro took his hand, still warm, and pressed it to her cheek. “Caro,” she whispered, her own name and the word for a man beloved.
Chapter 2: A Matter of Conscience
Emily Jarvie; her father, Lawrence; and her stepmother, Susan, sat at breakfast in the dining room of the house in Sumter County that Susan’s money had improved from a modest four-up-and-down structure into a house befitting a well-to-do planter. Her father shielded himself behind the newspaper sent from Charleston. He planned to run for election to the South Carolina Assembly in the fall, and his lawyer’s gaze never wavered from politics in Charleston, even in the quiet of their summer’s retreat.
She watched the curtains billow with the breeze that made the summer air of Sumter County so much cooler than Charleston’s. As she buttered a biscuit, the butler hurried into the room with a letter on a tray, a worried look on his usually placid face.
“What is it, Marcus?” Lawrence asked.
“Sorry to disturb you, suh.” Marcus had the accent of the Low Country, cleaned up for the big house. “Letter just come for you.”
Her father took it from the tray. Susan asked, “Who is it from?”
“Benjamin Pereira. I know him but not well. He’s a lawyer in Charleston.”
And so was her father himself. Emily knew that the lawyers of Charleston clustered together on Broad Street, as the turkey buzzards clustered at the Charleston Market.
Susan drew her brows together. “Why is he writing to you?”
Her father opened the envelope and unfolded the letter. At the sight of the black border, Emily’s heart sank.
Her father read it and said slowly, “My brother James died yesterday.”
Emily had met her Uncle James, her father’s elder brother, only once, when she was very small. She had a shadowy memory of a tall, slender, smiling man with a cap of golden hair. He had knelt and spoken to her with affection, as though he were used to talking to a little girl.
“We didn’t even know he was ill!” Susan exclaimed.
Lawrence shook his head. “It was sudden,” he said. “Yellow fever.”
“When is the funeral?”
Her father gazed at a spot beyond his wife’s head. His face, usually so taut and composed, seemed to sag. “Mr. Pereira asks us to go there to arrange it,” he said.
Susan shook her head. “Is there no one else?”
Now her father shook his head. “It will fall to us. How soon can we go there?”
“Must we hurry?” Susan asked. “You were estranged!”
Her father’s eyes clouded. “Yes, we were,” he said.
Emily knew that her uncle had left Charleston after his wife died, abandoning his law practice and a career that was expected to lead to a judge’s seat. He had remained on St. Helena Island since, refusing invitations to the season in Charleston or to the healthier summer air of the hills and the pines. He had always remembered her, the niece he had rarely seen, by sending her a book on her birthday. The most recent gift had been a peculiar one for an unmarried girl. He had sent her a copy of Moby-Dick.
Emily looked absently out the window. The conversation between her father and stepmother was familiar yet far away, like the sound of the quarrelsome jays that lived in the woods beyond the house. She stared at her hands, which were very pale in her lap against the black of her dress. Emily had been in mourning for more than a year. Her betrothed, Robert Herriot, had died two months before the wedding, and she had mourned Robert as though they had already married. Her hand went to her throat, where she still wore the brooch made of a lock of his hair.
At nineteen, Emily was well practiced in mourning. When she was twelve her mother died in childbed, and she had put on black for the first time. Her father, not knowing what to do with her, had sent her to Madame Devereaux’s Charleston academy for young ladies. Even though her father lived in Charleston as well, she became a boarder who went home only twice a year. When she returned for her second summer, her father had re
married. Susan was kind to her and didn’t pretend to be her mother. She didn’t mind that Emily liked to read or that she spent so much time writing in her diary. When Lawrence complained that Emily preferred the company of books to society, whether in the house in Charleston or the pines of Sumter, Susan would say, “Poor chick. She still misses her mother. Don’t press her, Lawrence.”
She sighed.
Susan touched her arm in affection and asked, “What is it, my dear?”
“Another funeral to attend.”
Susan said, “Not a great grief, though. Only a duty.” She stroked the black sleeve of Emily’s dress. “Only a few days on St. Helena to put things in order.”
Emily’s eyes filled with tears. She thought of Robert’s death and his funeral, as she had every day since he was buried, and again she touched the brooch at her throat.
Her father seemed diminished, shorter, quieter. In the depot of Stateburg, he bought their train tickets in silence, and once on the train, he left Emily and Susan in the first-class carriage and decamped for the smoking car, where men spat and drank in a fug of tobacco.
“Goodness,” her stepmother said. “I’ve never seen him so quiet.”
Emily smoothed the heavy black silk of her skirt and turned to gaze out the window at the familiar landscape. They never traveled from Stateburg to Charleston in the summer. That was the autumn journey, once the heat had broken and Charleston was safe from fever. It was peculiar to watch the pines disappear and to feel the summer’s heat come through the windows. She shook her head but didn’t reply, and her stepmother, who didn’t feel right unless she was talking to someone, struck up a conversation with a lady across the aisle.
Her father didn’t reappear until the train stopped in Charleston. He found a carriage to take them to the wharf for the last leg of the journey on the ferry to Beaufort. When Emily was a little girl—when her mother was still alive—it had been fashionable to spend summers on the Sea Islands in the belief that they were more healthful than Charleston. As they boarded the ferry—just like the river steamer she recalled from childhood—she had a vivid memory of standing at the railing beside her mother. Her mother’s lavender scent had wafted toward her, softening the salty, marshy smell of the inlets that marked this part of the coast. Her mother had put her arm around Emily’s shoulders and drawn her close. In her soft voice, she had said, “Do you recall how much pleasure we had last year? You’ll see all your friends again.”
Charleston's Daughter Page 2
