Now, on the boat, Susan found a spot in the saloon and insisted that Lawrence sit with them at the little iron table. She waved away the slave who offered them refreshment. She said, “Lawrence, sit still. There are arrangements to be made.”
Her father shifted in his chair. “Once we get there,” he said.
“There’s so much to do. A funeral to plan and then the estate to settle.” Despite her father’s air of command, Emily knew full well that her stepmother was the real manager in the Jarvie household. Her father would write the bank drafts, but her stepmother would arrange for the funeral service and the funeral breakfast.
Her father nodded but didn’t speak.
“And the houses to look after. That big place in Colleton County, and the grand house in Charleston. The Herriot house! It’s yours now.” Her father didn’t reply, and Susan said happily, “I wouldn’t mind living in Charleston in a house like that.”
“Not yet, Susan.”
She leaned forward. “We can plan, can we not? What we’ll do once you become the head of the family?”
Her father raised his head. There was a spot of red on his pale cheeks. “Not yet. Not now.”
“Grieving or not, there is so much to take care of—”
Her father pressed his hands against the edge of the table with such force that his knuckles showed white. “Stop it!” he said, raising his voice. “It’s not seemly!” He rose and strode to the railing. He stared out at the water with a rigid posture that recalled his youthful days at the military academy where he had studied as a cadet.
Susan said to Emily, “There was no love lost with James. I don’t know what’s gotten into him.”
Emily thought, I believe I do, and she rose to follow him. She leaned against the railing without speaking.
He spoke so softly that she had to lean close to hear him. “I always hoped that we might speak again, James and I,” he said. “That we might reconcile someday.”
She turned her head. To her surprise, her father covered her hand with his own, and she let it rest there. Even more softly, he said, “And now we never will.”
She didn’t reply, and they looked over the water together.
At the pier in Beaufort, they were met by a servant who introduced himself as the Jarvie coachman. He was a short man with bowed legs, his face weathered and seamed.
“What is your name?” her father asked.
“Henry, suh.”
“Have you been with the family long?”
“All my life, suh. My wife, Dulcie, too. She the cook.”
“Lawrence, let him load our trunks,” Susan said. “You don’t have to flatter him. He can’t vote for you.”
Emily was startled. Her stepmother was usually a staunch support to her father’s ambition to the Assembly and to the family ambition, the judge’s seat beyond it. She had told Emily that she would enjoy being the wife of a Charleston judge. James’s death, which opened the prospect of a new standing in Charleston, had stirred new ambitions in her.
Her father’s cheeks flamed red again, that spot like a dab of badly applied paint. “It never hurts to act the gentleman,” he reminded his wife.
Emily felt a flash of irritation, but she laid her hand on Susan’s arm. “You know that Papa will flatter anyone,” she said. “It’s in his nature.” She tried to smile.
“That’s enough,” Susan said, shaking herself free and giving Henry a sharp look.
Henry said softly, “Missus, things in disorder with Marse James’s passing. We all love him, and we upset. We try to do our best for you now.”
Emily glanced at Henry, whose face was set in a perfect expression of contrition, and thought, Who is the better flatterer?
Even though her memory was old and faded, Emily recognized the houses along the road to her uncle’s place. The plantations on St. Helena Island dated from the early years of the century before ostentation had overtaken country houses, and they were gracious two-story affairs, with porches on each story to catch the sea breezes, and were painted white to deflect the heat of summer. She had never visited her uncle’s house, but when the coach pulled up, she felt at home. It was just like the houses where they had stayed when she was a child, and as she took it in, she imagined that she smelled lavender beneath the perfume of jessamine and the flowers the slaves called heshaberry.
When Lawrence helped them out, her stepmother rustled her skirts in her impatience. She admonished the coachman. “You take good care of those trunks.”
Henry nodded and bent his head in deference. “Yes, Missus.”
The door opened as they mounted the stairs. A light-skinned servant, his temples frosted with gray, stood in the doorway.
He said softly, “I’m so sorry, ma’am. We out of sorts here since Marse James passed on.”
“I’ve come to do what I can,” Susan announced. She swept past him, and Emily reluctantly followed.
The curtains had been drawn, and the house was hushed. Someone had covered the mirror in the entryway, and the grandfather clock in the corner had been stopped so it did not tick or strike the hour while the inhabitants grieved. In a house without a wife, Emily wondered who had thought to prepare the house for mourning like that.
“Where is Mr. Jarvie?” Susan asked the butler.
“Upstairs, ma’am. They laying him out.”
“Take me up there.”
The butler said, “Let me settle you for a moment in the parlor…bring you something.”
Susan pulled off her gloves. “Show us upstairs.”
Reluctantly, he led them up the wide staircase to the second floor and tapped on the bedroom door, which was ajar. A distracted voice called, “What is it, Ambrose?”
“Mrs. Lawrence Jarvie and her daughter, ma’am.”
“Why did you bring them up? We aren’t ready for them.” From the room drifted the smell of rubbing alcohol and lavender.
Susan pushed past Ambrose and said, “We’ve come to make ourselves useful, if we can.”
The deceased, clad in his nightshirt, lay on the coverlet, his body carefully straightened, his eyes closed. A dark-skinned servant in a neat gray dress and a clean apron held a basin of water. Another servant wrung a cloth into it. A tall, slender woman, dressed in deep mourning, bent over the dead man. Beside her stood a girl, also in the deepest mourning, her hand on the older woman’s arm.
They were so fair of skin that at first, Emily didn’t realize they were colored.
Susan addressed the older of the aproned women. “What’s your name?” she demanded.
“Dulcie, ma’am.” She dropped her eyes. Susan turned to the younger. “And you?”
“Bel, ma’am,” she whispered.
Susan turned to the slender ivory-skinned woman in the dress of a widow. “And you?” she asked.
“I’m Mrs. Jarvie,” she said, in a low tone.
As Susan’s face registered surprise, she said, “Mrs. Catherine Bennett Jarvie.” She gestured toward the girl. Her skin was lighter than the older woman’s, but her expression was the same, all too familiar to Emily, the sheen of sleeplessness over the daze of grief. “This is my daughter, Miss Caroline Jarvie.”
Susan grabbed Emily’s hand. She pulled Emily down the stairs and marched through the house, looking for the room where the butler had settled her husband. She found Lawrence in the study, sitting in a wing chair worn with use. My uncle must have loved that chair, Emily thought. A decanter sat on the table by her father’s elbow, and the room smelled of warmed whiskey.
Susan flung her wadded gloves onto the table, next to the decanter. Lawrence looked up. “What is it?” he asked. “How bad is the disorder?” He sipped the whiskey. “They warned you.”
Her stepmother dropped into a nearby chair, struggling for words. She said, “There’s a slave woman in the house who calls herself Mrs. Jarvie.”
“I beg your pardon?” her father asked.
Susan cried, “She thi
nks of herself as his wife!”
Her father’s voice took on the lawyer’s tone, the sound of a man who asked distraught people questions to get at the truth. “Are there children?”
“A daughter. Almost grown.”
“And what does the girl call herself?”
Susan sent Emily an imploring glance. Help me, it said. Be outraged along with me. “Miss Jarvie,” she said.
Emily spoke. “Her name is Caroline,” she said.
Susan asked, “What possessed him?”
Emily thought, Didn’t you see it? How beautiful they are, both of them? She recalled the look of dazed pain on both of those lovely, light-skinned faces. And how stricken?
Her father drained his glass. “So that’s what he was hiding, living down here.”
Susan said, “There’s no thought of a funeral in Charleston. I can’t imagine burying him at St. Michael’s.”
Her father shook his head.
“Lawrence, I don’t care what they call themselves. They can’t stay in the house!”
Emily, who had remained standing, could not forget the look of grief on Caroline’s lovely face. She was louder and sharper than she intended. “Mother, leave them be! Let them grieve! Wait until after the funeral.”
Susan turned to her and spoke with a fury Emily had never felt from her stepmother before. “Who asked you?”
Susan’s insistence on a hushed funeral meant that she declined to hold the service in Beaufort, which had a well-established Episcopal church. She went to the tiny church on St. Helena itself, called the “White Church” because it had no provision for slaves to worship there. The minister told Susan that he would make an exception for the servants at the funeral. “Let the people grieve for their master,” he said. “He was a kindly man, and they loved him.”
Emily saw Susan bristle. Did the minister know the truth?
Susan said, “If you can’t accommodate them…”
“They can sit in the back pews, by the door,” the minister said.
Her father said decisively, “Yes, we’ll allow it.”
“Lawrence—”
“Until after the funeral, Susan.”
With a noiseless step, Emily entered the church flanked by her father and stepmother. It was melancholy to attend another funeral, since it reminded her so vividly of Robert’s, when she had been so afflicted that she had buried her face in her handkerchief. Today, as at Robert’s service, the air was hot and still, heavy with the lingering smell of Sunday’s incense, the silence broken by the murmur of people greeting each other as they slid into the pews.
Emily lingered near the door, where the Jarvie slaves had been accommodated. The men were in black suits, the women in dresses hastily dyed black, all of them clustered together in a phalanx of mourning for their master. In their midst sat Catherine and Caroline Jarvie, who were clad in sumptuous black dresses. But they hadn’t dared to wear the lady’s mourning bonnet. They had wrapped their heads in the scarves of slaves and tied them in the manner of the Low Country, with the black silk ends resting on their heads like a butterfly’s wings.
In the pew just ahead—also close to the door—sat a stranger, a slender man with a swarthy complexion. He wore black, as men usually did, but his face was drawn and pale, as though he had reason to grieve.
Susan pulled on Emily’s hand to guide her where she belonged: in the front row, as one of the chief mourners.
The hurried funeral had been badly attended, and few people returned to the house to pay their respects. The black Jarvies had gone upstairs. The house was quiet, not the pleasant quiet of an afternoon nap, but the painful quiet of loss—talk silenced, laughter stilled, hope extinguished.
The white Jarvies sat in the study, awaiting James’s lawyer. Susan asked, “When is he coming?”
Her father closed the paper, making it rustle, and said, “I told you. At two. Soon.”
Susan said irritably, “Lawrence, don’t rustle the pages so.”
Emily knotted her hands in her lap and said nothing.
Susan said, “Pereira, you said his name was? Who are his people? I don’t remember anyone with a Low Country place named Pereira.”
Emily said, “I knew a girl named Mimi Pereira at Madame Devereaux’s. Her father was a merchant. They’re Israelites.”
Lawrence said, “Mordecai Cohen is an Israelite, and he has a thousand acres and six hundred hands on the coast.”
“But this man? I thought you said he was a Charleston lawyer, not a planter.”
“I’ve seen him on Queen Street. We have professional acquaintance in common. I didn’t say I knew him well. I will say that I’m not sure I can trust a man who doesn’t set foot in a church.”
“I shudder to think of what’s in that will,” Susan said.
Her father sat upright and winced as though his back hurt him. “We’ll know soon enough.”
At the sound of the knock on the door, they heard footsteps on the stairs. Before Ambrose could open the door, Catherine Jarvie’s voice drifted from the foyer. “Let me greet him,” she said, as though she were still mistress of the house.
They heard a low-pitched voice say, “Kitty. Caro. I am so sorry—”
Ambrose interrupted. “Mr. Pereira, suh, let me show you into the parlor.”
Ambrose showed them in, and without asking, the two colored women entered, still in their black funeral dresses. They had removed the scarves; their heads were bare, their dark hair silky around their ears. Catherine Jarvie said, “Thank you, Ambrose.” She extended her hand to Lawrence. “Mr. Jarvie,” she said.
Her father stared at the hand, so graciously proffered. He said gruffly, “Surely you don’t expect me to shake your hand.”
The girl Caroline plucked at her mother’s sleeve. “Mama,” she said softly.
The room was so quiet that Emily could hear herself breathing. She shifted in her chair. She looked down at her hands. She was too uncomfortable to raise her head and look at the woman James had called his wife and the girl who was his daughter.
“Mr. Jarvie? We’ve met,” Pereira said.
“There was no need for you to trouble yourself,” her father said. “I’m capable of reading a will you know.”
“Of course,” Pereira said gently. “But you know, as well as I do, that no man should lawyer himself, especially in such melancholy circumstances.”
Lawrence gestured toward the two colored women. “Why are they here?”
Pereira said, “They were close to your brother. He would have wished them to hear the provisions of the will.”
When Pereira extended his hand to her, Emily recognized the stranger from the church. Her classmate Mimi Pereira had been blessed with bright-blue eyes, and the trait ran in the family because Benjamin Pereira had keen blue eyes in his swarthy face. If I didn’t know he was an Israelite, Emily thought, I might think he was colored. Pereira was older than her father—he was probably close to James in age—but he carried himself with a surprising grace, the light and easy step of a man who might like to dance.
Emily wondered what kind of will her uncle and this nimble man had devised together.
Pereira said to no one in particular, “May I sit at the desk?” He opened the portfolio he carried and laid the will on the desk.
Seated, he began to read in a low, sonorous voice. “I, James Durand Jarvie, of the parish of St. Helena Island in the state of South Carolina, being of good health and sound mind and memory, declare that this is my last will and testament. I hereby direct that all my just debts, both funeral and testamentary expenses, be fully paid and satisfied as soon as possible after my death.” He paused, as though reminding them, and continued. “I devise and bequeath to my brother Henry Lawrence Jarvie and his heirs and assigns all my lands at Colleton County in the state of South Carolina, the plantation and tract of land bequeathed to me by my father, John Jarvie, as well as the house, its contents, and the slaves upon it, as well as t
he house and lands on St. Helena Island. I also devise and bequeath to my brother Henry Lawrence Jarvie and his heirs and assigns my house in King Street in Charleston with all its contents. Item, I devise and bequeath to my niece, Emily Caroline Jarvie, a dozen books from my library, the particulars to be left to her discretion.”
Startled, Emily thought, To him I was still the little girl who liked to read.
Pereira read, “I also devise and bequeath my aforementioned brother the following Negro slaves, who are employed as servants in my house.” He paused, and Catherine and Caroline sat motionless. Emily would swear they had stopped breathing.
Pereira continued, “Ambrose; Henry; his wife, Dulcie; their daughters Peggy and Mattie; and their son, Hank; also Lydia and Bel.”
All of them waited to hear what James Jarvie had devised for the other two.
Pereira read, “For my servant Catherine, also called Kitty, who has been so faithful to me, forsaking all others, and her daughter Caroline, also called Caro, beloved to me, I appoint my brother Henry Lawrence Jarvie to be their guardian and to treat them with kindness, as he would members of the family, and that he free them as soon as it becomes possible.”
Pereira settled his gaze on Lawrence and read, “I do hereby nominate, constitute, and appoint my brother Henry Lawrence Jarvie executor of this, my will.”
In the silence, Pereira added, “He added a list of the slaves on his plantation in Colleton County, as well as the livestock, and also an inventory of the contents of this house, including his carriage and horses. I won’t read it, but you can examine it at your leisure, and let me know if you find any confusion or discrepancy.”
Charleston's Daughter Page 3
