Emily, who had been fond of Betsey, had a vague memory of visiting her before she died, but she had no memory of this building, smaller than a slave’s cabin on the Low Country place, with peeling boards, a splintered door, and oiled paper over the windows.
Sophy knocked on the door and pushed it open. Emily had no recollection of a dirt floor, or shabby rope beds, or rickety furniture.
Inside, Catherine and Caroline stood, awaiting her. She murmured, “How are you?”
Kitty murmured back, “We’re all right, Miss Emily.”
“Did the shawls suit you?”
“Very much, Miss Emily,” Kitty said. “We’ll welcome them when the weather turns cold.”
Emily took in the shack. She said, “This doesn’t suit you.”
Caro started forward, but Kitty said, “We’re grateful for it, Miss Emily.”
Emily sighed. Kitty was haggard. Grief had blurred her beauty, and she looked older than the beautiful widow that Emily had first seen tending to James Jarvie’s body. Her eyes were shadowed. Looking at her, Emily felt a stab of pain. She remembered the months after Robert’s death, when she had been in such a daze that she scarcely knew whether she was awake or asleep.
Emily said to Kitty, “I’ve brought something for you.” She took the portrait from the basket and presented it to Kitty.
Kitty bent her head over the portrait as though she were unable to believe that it had come back to her. She reached for the picture and cradled it in her hands. She gently stroked the surface, as though she were touching her husband’s beloved face. She looked up. “Miss Emily, I can’t accept this from you,” she said, handing it back. “I can’t have anyone thinking I stole it.”
Emily didn’t reach for it. “If anyone asks, I’ll tell the truth. That I gave it to you.”
Kitty weakened.
Emily said, “But no one will know because I’ll keep it a secret.”
“Miss Emily—”
“I want you to have it.”
“Is that a command, Miss Emily?”
What a peculiar thing for a slave to say. Emily thought of her stepmother and answered with a soft voice and a sweet smile to belie the words. “Yes, it is.”
“I have something for you too, Caroline,” Emily said, and she drew the book from her basket.
Caroline received the book with hands practiced in handling a volume. When she realized what it was, her face suffused with surprise. She raised her eyes to Emily’s. “How did you know?”
“I saw it in your room at St. Helena.”
“I hadn’t finished it. I have yearned for this book.”
Emily gazed at the girl who wore a Low Country kerchief, a field hand’s dress, and a pair of coarse shoes but who spoke with the diction of a boarder at Madame Devereaux’s. Emily knew that many slaves could read. She had found Ambrose reading the envelopes of her father’s correspondence before he brought the letters on a silver tray. She had kept Ambrose’s secret.
But this seemed different. Uncle James had given Emily a copy of the Melville book, too, and expected her to read it with understanding. She intruded to ask, “How were you educated?”
Caro said quietly, “My father taught me.”
“Why?”
Caro stared at Emily, an insolence softened by the tears that brimmed in her eyes. “Because he loved me,” she said.
Emily thought of her own father, who had given her anything she required but nothing that she treasured. She turned away, unable to watch Caro weep. She couldn’t bear to see the orphan, but she was equally disturbed by the slave who liked books as she herself did.
“I must go,” she said, and she left them to walk unsteadily to the kitchen. The cat followed her up the steps, mewing for her attention, but she ignored it. She pushed the door open and sat heavily at the kitchen table.
“Miss Emily?” Sophy asked. “You look mighty pale. Are you all right?”
“A cup of water, please.”
“What’s the matter?”
“I never met a slave girl who speaks like that.”
“Did she sass you?”
Emily said, “She talked about books.”
“She talk a lot of foolishness,” Sophy said, handing Emily the glass and watching as she drank. “Is you hungry, Miss Emily? I have fresh biscuit.”
Emily shook her head. She rose and picked up her basket. “Sophy, will you unlock the gate for me?”
At the gate, Sophy said, “If Caro act disrespectful to you, I chastise her, Miss Emily. I punish her, if you like.”
Emily thought of the cultivated voice, alight at the thought of Melville, and the dark eyes awash in tears. “No, Sophy. Don’t do that.”
“You do right, coming to see them. Do your Christian duty.”
Emily nodded. She stepped into the heat and stink of the street. She walked back to Orange Street in a daze at their audacity, hers and Caro’s. It would take more Christian charity than she could muster to accept that a book could stir a slave girl’s soul.
Emily laid down her pen and closed her diary. She picked up the portrait of Robert, which she always kept by her as she wrote, and touched the face forever smiling on the ivory surface. She tried to recall the living man, the sound of his voice, the glint of sunlight on his hair, the smell of his skin as he leaned close enough to kiss her, the touch of his lips on her face. He was fading, just as the flowers he had given her for a keepsake had faded. She pressed the portrait against her cheek, the spot that he had always kissed, and murmured, “I am so sorry, beloved.”
Susan Jarvie tapped on the door to Emily’s room. “Emily,” she said, as softly as she ever pitched her voice, and entered.
Emily set the portrait on her writing desk, next to the diary. “What is it, Mother?”
Susan picked up Robert’s portrait. “I thought you wanted to look at Uncle James for a while,” she said.
“It saddened me too much. I put that away.” Emily prayed that her stepmother would never ask to see where it had gone.
Holding Robert’s portrait, Susan asked, “Isn’t it time to put this away, too?”
Emily’s hand went to the brooch at her throat. “Mother, please,” she said.
“It’s been nearly two years. It would be different if you had married him, or if you had been a widow.”
Emily whispered, “I loved him as though I married him.”
“Oh, Emily. You didn’t marry him. It’s time. You don’t have to wear full mourning for Uncle James since you weren’t close to him. Would you consider it? Wearing gray, at least, and leaving off the mourning bonnet?”
“I can’t forget him.”
“No one is asking you to forget him.” She set down the portrait and came to stand behind Emily, letting her hands rest affectionately on Emily’s shoulders. “You should be married, Emily.”
“Not yet,” Emily said. “Not just yet.”
Susan stroked her shoulders. “Are you tired of Charleston? Would you like to go back to Sumter County?”
Emily sighed. “I don’t know,” she said.
“You could stay with your sister.” Emily’s half sister, Nancy, ten years her senior, had married an upcountry cotton planter and lived in Sumter County year-round. “You could see the new baby.” The baby was nine months old, able to smile at a doting aunt. “And the Aiken girls are still there. They can keep you company.”
The Aiken girls, Jane and Camilla, distant kin to Nancy’s husband Charles, were a little younger than Emily. They chattered like a flock of Carolina wrens, chirping about bonnets and dresses and young men who might be beaux and young men who had been captured as husbands. Emily doubted that they had read a book between the two of them since they had been liberated from Madame Togno’s, an even more exclusive and restrictive place to be finished than Madame Devereaux’s.
“Do you want me to go?” Emily asked.
Susan bent to kiss the part of Emily’s hair. “Not at all,” sh
e said. “Only to do what might cheer you.”
Into Emily’s mind flashed the memory of Caroline, whose face lit with joy as she spied the cover of Moby-Dick. She sighed and closed the diary. She said, “I’ll go to Sumter County until the frost.”
“When you return, will you consider the other? Putting off your mourning?”
“Ask me again when I return, Mother.”
When the coachman handed her out, Emily took the first deep breath in weeks. She let the cool, pine-scented air flow into her and over her. In relief, she undid the strings of her mourning bonnet and let it slip down her back.
Her sister waited for her on the first-floor piazza. Nancy held out her arms, and Emily dutifully went into Nancy’s embrace. Nancy released her. “Still in that black dress,” she said.
Stung, Emily asked, “Were you ever in mourning?”
“Of course,” Nancy said. “For two months. Isn’t that enough for an uncle you barely knew?”
“I still remember Robert,” Emily said, clenching her skirt in her hand.
“Oh, Emily,” Nancy said, in the motherly tone that she had always used with her half sister.
“Not you, too,” Emily said. “Mother has already chided me.”
Nancy said, “This is no way to start your visit, Emily. Come in. Charles has been making improvements again. I’ll show you.” She gestured toward the Doric columns. “Those are new. Aren’t they fine?”
They were a replica of the columns on the much more imposing house of one of Charles’s cousins, whose wealth was anchored by a Low Country plantation. They only summered here. Nancy had married into the upcountry branch of the sprawling Aiken family, younger sons who had turned to cotton and had made their fortunes in the cotton boom of the last fifteen years.
“Very fine,” Emily murmured. Emily could remember when Stateburg was a small and rustic place. Now it was doubly full of money from the profit in cotton and the profit that came when a rich upcountry man married a Low Country heiress.
“Come inside and see,” Nancy said. “I’ve been making improvements, too.”
She led Emily into the front parlor, which had been wallpapered in a lustrous pattern of brocade. The furniture was in the newest style: dark, carved, and ornate. “What happened to all the furniture you inherited from the Aikens?” Emily asked.
“It’s in the back parlor.” Nancy grinned. “Charles’s mama is very angry with me for putting the family heirlooms out of sight. I was so tired of them! I wanted something new.”
“It dazzles,” Emily murmured.
“I can tell you don’t like it. Have you seen the house on King Street?” Without waiting for an answer, Nancy said, “The Herriot house! Imagine us living in the Herriot house!”
Emily said quietly, “It was James Jarvie’s house, and we don’t live in it yet. The Herriot cousins are still renting it.”
“Mother wrote me that she visited them. It’s grand, and everything is a hundred years old. She hated the furniture, too.” Nancy laughed. “When you move in, there’s no one to stop her from throwing it out!”
She had accompanied her mother on that visit. She thought of the Sheraton settee in the parlor, with its lovely curved legs, and the matching chairs, so daintily made, given to the servants as castoffs, or worse, cut up to be burned like kindling. Poor furniture, cast out.
“Emily, are you listening at all? You’re worse than ever, woolgathering. I saw you with a book in your hand as you got out of the coach.” It was true. Thinking of Caroline, she had brought the Melville. “How many books did you bring in your trunk?”
“Just a few. I thought I’d have a quiet visit.”
Nancy shook her head. “The summer season is almost over, and you’re still in mourning,” she said. “A man will look at a girl if she’s wearing a pretty dress. Not many men will look at a girl who decks herself out like a widow.”
Emily had met many widowers whose black suits were the dress of business as well as that of mourning, and she had seen how greedy they were to remarry. “A man will look at any woman who catches his eye,” she said, still sharp with her sister.
Nancy sighed and put her arm around Emily’s shoulders. “All right. For your sake, we’ll have a quiet visit.”
“Quiet” meant that the calls began at eleven, just after the breakfast dishes had been cleared away. Nancy excused herself—“I have things to look after”—and sent Emily into the back parlor, where the Sheraton furniture had been exiled. Camilla Aiken, who was the first to arrive, bounded into the house. Cicero, the dignified butler, trailed behind her, saying, “Miss, I can’t announce you if you run like that!”
Camilla, who was younger than Jane, liked to boast that she was taller. Her hair was blonder and more lustrous than her sister’s, and even though her mother dressed her in girlish white, her muslin dress was adorned with the draped and tiered “pagoda” sleeves that Godey’s liked so much and girdled with a deep pink ribbon. “Emily!” she said, grinning. “I heard you arrived yesterday!”
“Where is Jane?”
Camilla plumped down on the nearest chair too vigorously for its fragile lines and didn’t bother to smooth her skirt. “Such news, Emily!”
“Is she all right?”
“Better than all right. She’s in a tizzy!”
“Stop it, Camilla. You’re making my head ache. What’s happened?”
“Her best beau, that planter from Mississippi, just asked for her. Just yesterday! And she said yes.”
“I didn’t know he was her best beau.”
“Did being in Charleston addle you? He’s been here all summer, sitting by her at every picnic, walking with her in the evenings, and dancing with her at every party. I knew he’d ask for her. I saw them together under the live oak in our front yard last week. He kissed her!”
The news came to Emily like a letter from a foreign country. It was of mild interest, but it had nothing to do with her. “How nice,” she said. “I’m glad for her.”
Camilla leaned forward. If they had been sitting side by side, she would have poked Emily in the ribs with her elbow. “Nice! Is that all you can say? It’s grand! He has nearly a thousand acres and three hundred hands. He’s the richest planter in the county. A Carolina man who went there ten years ago with nothing, and he’s made a fortune there.”
Emily tried to recall the man, since she had surely met him more than once, and could not. “What is he like?”
“He’s a gentleman, even though he thinks about cotton all the time. Handsome, too. He wears white linen, even in Sumter County. He says that Mississippi has thinned his blood so much that he feels the heat all the time.”
“I hope he isn’t ailing.”
“Oh no. Jane tells me that he dances with considerable vigor!”
Emily blinked at Camilla, who was supposed to be too innocent to think about a man’s vigor. “When will the wedding be?”
“Not for months. There’s the trousseau to think of, and the church, and the wedding breakfast, and the wedding journey. Both Mama and Jane will be in a tizzy together, arranging everything.” Camilla laughed. “Jane is in such a state that I think she’s forgotten there will be a husband at the end of it.”
A vigorous man to greet her in the marriage bed. Emily shook her head. What was wrong with her? These were thoughts that belonged in a barnyard. Why did they come to her? Robert’s caresses had been chaste and delicate. She asked, “Does she love him?”
“I suppose so. Whenever she mentions him, she blushes. It’s an even chance whether she’ll laugh or cry.”
“Tell her that I wish the best for her,” Emily said, smoothing the black silk of her skirt.
“Oh, you can do better than that. We’re having a party in a week to celebrate the engagement. Dancing, and music, and cards for the gentlemen, and such a supper. Our poor cook is in a tizzy, too.”
Emily nodded politely. Camilla leaned forward again, and Emily wondered what confid
ence she’d impart. She said, “Now that Jane’s taken care of, I can get married!”
Emily sighed and hoped that Camilla would keep her thoughts about manly vigor to herself.
“Emily, what’s wrong with you? Don’t you care? Getting married is important!”
“Yes, it is,” Emily said. Distant news from a place far away.
“I’m not going to bother with any of these upcountry men,” Camilla said. “All they care about is drinking and hunting, hunting and drinking. And all they talk about is cotton and politics, when it isn’t politics and cotton! I want to marry a Low Country man. Someone refined and grand. Someone who has a big place on the coast and a fine summer house—I don’t mind the pines, for the summer—and a house in Charleston, too, for the races and the season. A house like your uncle’s. That’s what I want!”
“You’re supposed to want it, Camilla, but you aren’t supposed to say so.”
Camilla smiled, and her teeth gleamed a predatory white. “A girl can have ambitions, too,” she said.
Only to snare a rich man and bring him down with the efficiency of a cottonmouth snake. Emily looked at her hands.
“Emily, cheer up. There’s the engagement party to look forward to. Why don’t you put off your mourning? You could dance.”
This was a message louder and closer to home. Emily raised her head. “Not yet,” she said.
Camilla leaned close enough to grasp her hands. “Oh, Emily. We all know you loved Robert Herriot, and that his death was a blow to you. But it’s been almost two years. Isn’t it time? Time to give the men hope? Even a widow can get married again, and you aren’t a widow.”
“I’m not ready,” she said, her hand stealing to the ornament at her throat.
“I wish you’d set aside that thing. Even jet would be better. There’s something so morbid about a hair brooch.”
Emily was suddenly very angry. She said to Camilla, “I hope that you marry a Low Country man who’s as rich as Croesus and twice your age. He’ll die well before you do, and make you a rich widow. Then we’ll see how you like it.”
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