When her mother wearied of the shack, she sat in the kitchen while Sophy and Caro made themselves useful. Sophy had yet to admonish Kitty to make herself useful.
As Kitty watched Caro help Sophy string beans, the bell on the gate jangled, once and then again—the sound of someone itching with impatience. “Stay put,” Sophy said. “I see who it is.”
She returned with an uneasy look on her face. “Gal named Bel from Marse Lawrence. She want you.”
Caro looked at her mother, and they had the same thought. Kitty rose. “I’ll go with you.” Sophy followed.
Bel stood at the end of the driveway, shifting from foot to foot. She was plumper than she had been, more self-important. When she saw Caro, her face worked like someone who wanted to sneer and knew she shouldn’t. She said, “Marse Lawrence want to see you. Now.”
“Why?”
“Didn’t say. Just said to hurry.”
“You ran here to drag me there, and you don’t know why?”
Bel’s face turned sullen. “I ain’t like you. When Marse Lawrence tell me to do something, I do it. And no fancy words to ask why.” Caro pulled herself up straight. Bel said, “You ain’t a bit better than me. His slave, just like I am. He said to hurry.”
“I’m going with her,” Kitty said.
“No, you ain’t. He say just Carrie.”
Caro glared at Bel. “My name is Caroline,” she said.
Enjoying her new power, Bel said, “If you don’t shut up, I tell Marse Lawrence, and he send the Guard for you to take you to the Work House.”
Sophy said, “No one need to go to the Work House. Kitty, you hush. Caro, you go.”
Caro thought, She knows something. What is it? There was a peculiar expression on Sophy’s face, the facial version of can’t say. “Mama, I’ll be right back,” she said.
“If you aren’t, I’ll go after you, and I don’t care if I end up in the Work House.”
Bel grabbed her arm. “Come on,” she said. “I don’t care who else go to the Work House, but I don’t want to.”
Caro followed Bel into the street, where Bel set a swift pace. Caro’s shoes still bothered her. Cross, Bel said, “Can’t you walk any better than that?”
Her feet hurt, and her heart beat fast in fear.
At the Orange Street house, Bel yanked on her arm. “The side door,” she said.
Caro followed Bel down the driveway, through the servant door, and through the back hallway. Bel ventured into the main hallway and moved with less surety. She stopped outside the study and tapped on the door. “Marse?” she called.
Lawrence’s irritated voice floated into the hall. “Yes?”
“I bring her like you ask me.”
“Well, show her in.”
Bel shoved her, rather than showed her, into the room. Lawrence said, “You can go, Bel.”
“Yes, Massa,” Bel said, backing out the door.
He didn’t invite her to sit. He said, “Your mistress and I have been discussing what to do with you.”
It was as she feared. They had been talking about selling her.
The room swam before her eyes.
The auction block. A pretty, light-skinned girl for a man’s fancy. A man crueler than her father who bought a girl to keep, use for pleasure, and cast away.
Now she was doubly sorry that she hadn’t been invited to sit because she would disgrace herself by falling to the floor in a faint.
Lawrence said, “We’ve made a decision.”
Torn from her mother to be sold as a fancy girl. The room seemed to go black.
“We have decided to give you the laundry.”
Caro blinked. Laundry? In her surprise, she said the first thing that came into her head. “Doesn’t Lydia do the laundry?” As soon as the words left her mouth, she imagined Sophy’s voice: “Sass.”
His cheeks colored, as they had when the will was read. This was an embarrassment for him. It would be his wife’s task if she didn’t loathe Caro so much. He said, “The weekly wash. Bel will instruct you on the particulars.”
She stammered, “Come here to do the wash?”
“No, not here,” he said.
It’s Missus Susan, she thought. She doesn’t even want me in the yard, where she can’t see me.
“Take it to Tradd Street. Do it there.”
She tried to still her racing heart and her trembling legs. The wash. The weekly wash. In the yard of the house on Tradd Street. Out of sight, with Sophy.
“Go,” he said, and turned his attention to a paper on the desk.
She turned to go.
He said, “Don’t turn your back on me.”
She halted and turned again. “What do you want of me?”
“Back out of the room. And you’ll address me as Master.”
Caro took a deep breath and dropped her eyes as demurely as she could. In a tone that would have done credit to a girl at Madame Devereaux’s, she said, “Yes, Master.” Despite her trembling legs, she backed from the room.
Bel was waiting. She didn’t speak. She grabbed Caro by the arm and dragged her out the side door, through the yard, and into the kitchen that doubled as the wash house. On the table lay a big bundle, wrapped in a sheet. Bel said, “You take this. You bring it back next week. And you do it right.”
When Caro staggered into the yard at Tradd Street, the bundle in her arms, her mother flew to her. “Are you all right?”
She dropped the bundle on the steps and rubbed her arms. She shook all over but not from carrying a heavy load.
Sophy asked, “What have you got there?”
“What does it look like? Wash,” Caro snapped.
“Why you tote it in your arms?”
“How else would I carry it?”
Sophy hefted the bundle, and with an easy motion, she positioned it on her head, steadying it with her hand. “Like this,” she said, her voice muffled.
“How do you manage it?”
Sophy’s laughter struggled through the dirty cloth. “Every Low Country woman learn it,” she said. “This weigh less than a sheaf of rice, and I carry a sheaf of rice many a time when I was a girl.” She put the bundle on the ground. She was still laughing. “Uh-hm, you the most ignorant girl I ever saw,” she said. “Did your mama forget to teach you how to do the wash, too?”
Caro was suddenly very angry. She kicked the bundle with all her might. She thought of everything she knew, everything that was now so useless to her, and she began to sob noisily. The fear of the morning returned to her. She wailed, “I thought he was going to sell me! Put me on the block to be a fancy girl!”
Kitty embraced her and sobbed with her.
Sophy let them both cry. When they broke apart, she said to Caro, “I school you. We do the wash together. We add it to mine, when I do it.”
Caro had observed Lydia doing the wash in the yard of the King Street house, but she had never touched the washtub herself. Under Sophy’s eye, she heated the water for the tub and added the soap and the bluing. When she slipped the clothes into the water, Sophy added her wash, too. Sophy gave her a wooden pole. “You stir them around, get them good and full of soap,” she said. Caro obeyed her.
Kitty opened the door of the shack and walked across the yard. Sophy was still angry with her. She called, “Don’t you want to make yourself useful today?”
“No, I do not,” Kitty said, and she walked into the kitchen, where she knew she would find coffee on the hob of the stove.
Caro and Sophy worked all morning to wash and wring the clothes, and by the time they hung them to dry, Caro was sorry that she had ever had a harsh word for Lydia. Sophy said, “They take a while to dry in this damp heat. Hang overnight.” She looked up at the cloudless sky. “Pray it don’t rain. Because then we wash them all over again.”
Once the clothes were dry, Sophy taught her how to iron, and that was even worse than washing. Sophy showed her how to heat the iron on the trivet on
the hearth, and she burned herself more than once to test it. Sophy let her learn on a tea towel, but she watched carefully, and more than once she snatched the iron away, scolding, “Don’t scorch!”
Caro rubbed the newest burn on her hand and thought, If Mr. Jarvie wanted to torment me on purpose, he couldn’t have found a better way to do it.
When the clothes were ironed, she helped Sophy fold them neatly and tie them into a bundle to take back to the house on Orange Street.
When she arrived, Bel came to meet her in the kitchen. She untied the bundle. She shook out the topmost shirt, inspected it, and to Caro’s disgust, sniffed it, even though all it smelled of was soap and bleach. Taking the shirt, Bel left for the house, and Caro stood uneasily at the table while Dulcie worked at the stove without speaking to her.
Bel returned with another bundle. Another week’s torment, Caro thought. Bel said, “This for you.”
Caro nodded.
Bel held out her fist. “This for you, too.”
“What is it?”
Bel opened her hand. In it sat five silver dimes.
In surprise, Caro said, “Why would he pay me?”
“I don’t know. He say to give it to you. Go on, and come back next week.”
In the driveway, Caro tried to balance the bundle on her head and steady it with her hand. It was too heavy and too ungainly. Her head ached beneath it. She wrapped her arms around it and lugged it back to Tradd Street, where she heaved it onto the kitchen table.
Sophy looked up from the cornbread she stirred and said, “Next time I do less, and you do more.”
Caro said, “He paid me.”
“Really? How much do he pay you?”
Her arms aching, Caro pulled the money from her pocket to show Sophy.
Sophy said, “That ain’t right. For a load like he give you, a washwoman get two, three dollar.”
“Why would he pay me at all, Sophy? He hates me.”
“Someone in that house feel bad about turning you out,” Sophy said. “They persuade him, and he pay you. But not much.”
Several days later, as Caro labored over the next load, Sophy announced another visitor. Caro stood upright and pressed her hands to her sore back. “Not Bel again!”
“No,” Sophy said. “Miss Emily.”
Caro wiped her soapy hands on her apron.
Emily came into the yard with a gentle step, as though she were worried about intruding. She wore a black dress—she must have many, but it looked just like the others—and her face was hidden inside a black bonnet. Over her arm she carried a basket covered with a cotton cloth.
At the sight of Emily Jarvie, before her in the flesh and not a shadow or the flicker of a silk skirt, Caro felt her anger return. She dropped her eyes, not in servility but in rage.
Emily said, “Caroline. Is your mother here?”
As Sophy fetched Kitty, Emily said, “I’m sorry to disturb you at your work.”
Caro tried to say, “It’s all right,” but she was too angry to do more than mumble.
When Kitty arrived, Emily greeted her, too. “Catherine.”
“Miss Emily,” her mother said politely.
Emily unfolded the cloth and lifted the basket. “I had some shawls that my mother gave me,” she said. “They never suited me, and I thought they would look better on you, both of you.”
Caro could see the folded shawls. They were pretty paisleys of the quality a lady would wear. Perhaps she wasn’t lying, and they were a gift instead of charity.
Emily said, “It will be cold when winter comes. I’d be glad to know that you’re warm enough.”
Kitty said, “That’s kind of you, Miss Emily.”
Emily shook out the topmost shawl, a paisley in a dark-red pattern. “This is for you, Catherine,” she said gravely.
Kitty shook it out with a practiced gesture and draped it over her shoulders.
Emily smiled. “It does suit you,” she said.
Caro thought, This is quite a show to pretend it isn’t charity. She felt less angry. She wondered what color Emily thought would suit her.
Emily took out the second shawl. “And this is yours, Caroline,” she said, the faintest smile on her face.
It was blue, and it was the softest wool she had ever touched. She put it on, forgetting her field hand’s dress and her soapy apron, and she thought, If this is charity, she is the slyest girl I’ve ever met.
Caro pressed the shawl to her cheek. And it came to her. Before she guarded her tongue, she blurted it out. “It was your idea, wasn’t it? The washing?”
Emily flushed bright red. She nodded. “I can ask my mother’s friends if they need a laundress, if it would help you,” she said.
Kitty, unhappy about the laundry but astute about making an ally, said firmly, “We appreciate what you do for us, Miss Emily. We both thank you.”
Emily reached for Caro, touching her gently on the wrist, the spot where Missus Susan had once bruised her.
As Emily walked down the driveway to the gate, Caro followed the sight of that slender, black-clad figure until it disappeared.
Part 2
A Fragile Freedom
1859
Chapter 5: Hearth and Home
At her stepmother’s insistence, Emily had inherited Caro’s furniture from St. Helena Island. Now she slept in Caro’s bed, brushed her hair before Caro’s dressing table, and stored her clothes in Caro’s clothes press. Susan had brought Caro’s dresses to Charleston as well. They were so fine that Susan had said, “When you put off your mourning, we’ll have them made over for you.”
Her stepmother had taken nothing of Kitty’s, save for her jewelry. She had gotten rid of Kitty’s dresses. She had stripped the good cotton sheets from Kitty’s bed and given the pillows and the coverlet to Dulcie. She had removed all the ornaments and knickknacks that had belonged to Kitty and was about to pack them away when Emily had said, “Let me have the portrait of Uncle James.”
It was a miniature painted on ivory set in a gilded frame, and the sight of it was as distasteful to her stepmother as Kitty’s chemises and crinolines. “Do you really want it?”
The artist had caught her uncle in the sunny expression that Emily remembered from her visit to him as a little girl. Emily could understand why Kitty had wanted to see that image every day when she woke and just before she slept.
Emily said, “I’d like to have something to remember him by.”
“It was hers,” Susan said, her hand curling over the little oval of ivory.
Emily said, “Now it’s ours,” and she held out her hand for it.
Her stepmother shook her head. “Emily, I don’t know what’s gotten into you since your uncle died.” She gave the portrait to Emily.
Now, back in Charleston, Emily gazed at the portrait of James, his smile still alive in its framework of ivory and gold, and she thought of Kitty. “Nothing in this house is yours,” her stepmother had said to Kitty, but she had been wrong. Emily owned a portrait of Robert, which she had kept with her since his death. She had difficulty remembering his living face, and the portrait was now her memory. Emily thought of the widow’s mask of grief, which she herself knew so well, and her hand closed over the portrait.
She should bring Caro something she would treasure, too. She thought of the Bible she had pleaded to give to Caro. She was ready to put her own Bible, with its gilt-edged pages, into her basket, but suddenly she had a better idea. She smoothed the skirt of her black dress, put on the bonnet draped with black crape, and picked up a basket.
At the foot of the stairs, Ambrose asked her, “Are you wanting to go out, Miss Emily?”
“I am, Ambrose. Can you unlock the gate for me?”
“Miss Susan take the carriage. Don’t you want to wait?”
“I’m only going to the market. It isn’t far.”
“I can ask one of them little girls to carry that basket for you, Miss Emily.”
&nb
sp; She smiled. It was easy to keep an even temper with the new servants. She liked Ambrose, even when he was being a busybody and a fusspot. “It’s all right, Ambrose. I can manage by myself.”
He opened the gate for her, and she left the fragrant shade of the garden for the bright sun and the reek of the street. She blinked against the sun and adjusted her bonnet to shade her eyes better. She balanced the basket on her arm, and for the second time, sought the house on Tradd Street.
At the gate, Emily rang the bell. Now she knew to wait, but it seemed a long moment in the sun until she heard the footsteps that were not in a hurry and saw the familiar dark face.
“Oh, Miss Emily!” Sophy said. “You come back.”
“I’ve come again to see Catherine and Caroline to find out how they’re faring.”
Sophy regarded her with mistrust. “Did your mama send you this time?”
“No. She doesn’t know I’m here.”
Sophy gave her a bright, beady look. “You wait a moment.” She bustled off. Now she was in a hurry.
Emily thought, Does she think I don’t know? She’s going to warn them I’ve come. Emily knew, as her stepmother did not, that the servants called Susan “the Old Jay” behind her back, and they whistled a jay’s call to let anyone who was dawdling or sleeping to straighten up and look bright for the missus.
Emily waited. Under her bonnet, an unladylike drop of sweat trickled down her face. She wondered how careful their response would be, when Sophy finally admitted her into the shade of the driveway.
Sophy returned. “Now you come with me.”
Sophy guided her into the overgrown yard, where the smell of garbage was still strong. As they walked past the kitchen, the cat jumped off the steps to brush against her dress. “Shoo!” Sophy said.
Emily bent to pet the cat, and it rubbed against her hand, purring.
“They in their little house today,” Sophy said, and she stopped before Betsey’s old shack.
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