Camilla burst into laughter. “Wouldn’t that be a thing!” she said. “Then I’d have a thousand acres and six hundred slaves and three grand houses. All for myself!” Still laughing, she rose. “We’ll send out proper invitations for the engagement party. Don’t stay home, Emily. Mother will want to see you, even if you’re dressed like a crow.”
Her laughter echoed in the hall as dignified Cicero asked, “Miss, shall I call for your carriage?”
Nancy’s definition of “quiet” included a guest for midday dinner later that day. “Don’t fuss, Emily,” she said. “It’s our neighbor, Mr. John Ellison. Hardly a crowd.”
She knew Ellison only slightly. He was a local man from a poor farming family, and her father had never taken notice of him. Ellison had risen to wealth only within the past few years, as his cotton plantation had prospered and expanded. She had never met his wife. “Will Mrs. Ellison join us?”
“Emily, sometimes I wonder if you have peanuts stuck in your ears. Don’t you recall? She died two years ago.”
Just when I had lost Robert, she thought. “Did you invite him here?”
“I won’t stand for any more foolishness from you. He’s a friend to Charles. They hunt together, and they’ll talk about horses. He won’t even take notice of you.”
He was a sturdy man, with the ruddy complexion and the crow’s-feet of someone who spent a great deal of time outdoors. Weather-beaten, she thought, comparing him to Robert, who had been slight and pale. He took her hand with too much strength for politeness. Camilla would call him vigorous.
Nancy was proven right. Ellison addressed all his conversation to Charles. She thought of Camilla again. Hunting and drinking and politics and cotton. He had a good appetite. He got up twice to refill his plate at the sideboard, and he let Charles refill his glass twice.
Nancy was the one to say, in good humor, “Can’t politics wait until you’ve retired to the library after dinner? We ladies don’t read the papers and don’t follow it as you do.”
Ellison’s ruddy face flushed. “Beg your pardon, Miss Nancy. I don’t often converse with ladies, and I don’t know what interests them.”
“Well, there is the news of the day about Miss Jane Aiken’s engagement.”
Ellison, so eloquent on the subject of horses and cotton, stared at his plate and mumbled, “It’s a fine thing. He’s a good man.”
“It’s a grand thing! We’ll all have the chance to celebrate with her.”
Ellison said, “I don’t have much society since my wife died.”
“Oh, pshaw, Mr. Ellison. You should. The ladies would be as glad of it as the gentlemen!”
He looked dutifully at Emily. As though he had been prompted, he said, “Miss Emily, your sister told me about your loss. I’m sorry to hear about it.”
Emily flushed. She said, “Did she tell you that she thinks it’s wrong that I’m still in mourning?”
Ellison looked puzzled. “Why would it be wrong? He was close to you.”
She felt her color and her temper rise. “Of course he was! I nearly married him!” She rose and threw her napkin on the table. Nancy had managed this, Emily was sure of it. “I’m tired of it, Nancy! Tired of it!” She cast a baleful glance at Ellison. “Lying to me, when all you wanted was to put the widower in the way of the girl who dresses like a widow!”
She ran from the room, discovering that if she breathed too deeply, she would start to sob. She leaned against the wall in the hallway, her eyes blurred with anger.
Nancy’s tread resounded on the wood floor. Nancy didn’t pull her aside. She raised her voice in the hall, where it was perfectly audible in the dining room. “How dare you,” she said. “I won’t have such rudeness at my table! You’ll go back into the dining room and apologize to our guest.”
“I will not,” Emily said. “I’ll go upstairs to pack my things, and I’ll go back to Charleston.” She was breathing hard, as though she’d been running through the woods.
There was a tap on the doorframe. “Excuse me,” said Ellison.
“Leave us alone,” Nancy said, in a tone just as rude as Emily’s.
“Mrs. Aiken, if she ain’t ready to marry again—or even to think about marrying again—it was wrong to press her.”
Emily looked up in surprise.
“Miss Emily?” he inquired, a soft tone for so rough-looking a man. “My wife was barely cold in her grave when the ladies of the county started to bring their girls around to get me married again. I weren’t ready, either.”
Emily swallowed hard.
He gestured toward her black dress. “I meant to say I was sorry about your uncle, but I’m sorry about your young man, too. I’m sorry for your losses, both of them.”
Emily stared at him.
“Will you accept an apology, Miss Emily? Would you come back to the table with me? Finish your dinner?”
He was kinder and wiser than she had given him credit for. He offered her his arm, and she accepted that, too.
Camilla called daily, telling her more about wedding preparations and maidenly modesty than she wanted to hear. She said to Emily, “So Mr. Ellison came to dine with you.”
Emily shook her head. “Just a friendly visit over dinner.”
“I heard differently. That he was invited here to be put in your way, and he in yours.”
“Camilla, if you don’t shut up”—she spat out the vulgar words—“I’ll pull your hair and slap you.”
Camilla said, “Would you feel any better knowing that he was put in my way, too? And in the way of every girl in Sumter County.”
“I thought he wasn’t ready to marry again.”
“Is that what he said?”
Puzzled, Emily said, “He’s a little rough and plain-spoken, but he seems like a decent man. Why won’t any of the girls have him?”
Camilla gave an unladylike snort. “Visit his place. Go to the stables with him. You’ll see it.”
“What?”
“He loves his horses better than he ever loved his wife,” Camilla said.
Mr. Ellison’s house was no different from any other in the county—four rooms on each of its two stories—but his carriage house, which included his stable, was large enough to accommodate a carriage as well as the buggy and had room enough for a dozen horses. He insisted on giving Emily the tour of his place before the meal was served. Charles accompanied them, and Emily had no worry in Ellison’s company. “I hope you don’t mind,” he said to Emily. “I’m proud of it, and I like to show it off.”
She obliged him. He took them past the pleasant gardens that surrounded the house and escorted them to see the cotton fields. Grinning, he said, “It’s a fine place, Miss Emily. Five hundred acres in cotton and corn, a place to give those Mississippi men a run for their money. And over a hundred hands to work it!” He watched as the slaves stooped to reach for the bolls.
“How many horses do you keep, Mr. Ellison?”
“I have a dozen. Come see. You too, Aiken. I’ve just bought a new hunter. A black beauty!” He took Emily to the stable, large enough for a dozen horses, every stall occupied. He stopped to show her the black mare, stroking the animal’s neck. “Ain’t she fine?” he said, his face full of admiration.
“Very fine.”
“You like your horses,” Emily observed softly.
“Horses don’t disappoint,” Ellison said. His plain face darkened for a moment.
They walked back to the house. In the side yard, a slave woman sat in a chair, watching as her charges—a boy of four and a child of indeterminate sex, still of an age to crawl and dressed in a long white gown—played.
Ellison ran to scoop up the little boy. “Johnny!” he said, holding the child high as he cried out in fear and glee. He lowered the child and rubbed his face against the boy’s cheek.
“Daddy!” the little boy cried. He set the boy down. “And Amelia!” He bent low to pet the golden head of the crawler, as though she w
ere a puppy, and bent even lower, to kiss the curls.
He stood up and asked the nurse, “Polly, how do my young’uns get on today?”
The nurse was very young, Caroline’s age, Emily thought, and her face was dark brown and smoothed of emotion under her white scarf. “They get on fine, Marse John,” she said.
Against her bosom, which strained against her bodice, she held another child, a suckling infant only a few months old. It was heavily swaddled, but Emily caught a glimpse of the little face. The baby had the milky complexion that spoke of racial mixture.
Emily regarded her reflection in the dressing table mirror and sighed. She had made no end of trouble about wearing mourning. She had bickered with her sister, insulted Camilla, and mortified herself before John Ellison for this dress. Now, as her sister’s maid readied her for the party at the Aikens’, she saw herself through Camilla’s eyes: a girl in crow’s feathers whose only jewel was a lock of a dead man’s hair. Robert, she thought, beloved. But he was too far away, and even his memory now slipped through her hands like a wisp of smoke, a wraith too insubstantial to grasp.
“Miss?” the maid asked. “Is you ready?”
Her sister’s servant was so quiet and self-effacing that Emily had trouble remembering her name. “Yes, thank you,” she said. She rose to attend a party where dancing was the chief celebration, even though she had denied herself the pleasure of it.
The Aiken house blazed with candlelight in the fall dusk. The great chandelier in the ballroom shone like the sun at midday. The room was as loud as the crowd at the races, the chatter of the women drowned out by the laughter of the men. The house smelled of the cut roses and gardenias from the front garden and the odor of cigar smoke from the card-players in the parlor behind the ballroom.
The bride-to-be, anticipating her future, wore a dress festooned with roses in red silk and made with a draped white satin even whiter than the flesh of her arms and neck. She also wore a spray of rosebuds in her hair, which gleamed golden in the candlelight. Beside her stood her future husband, dressed in his habitual white suit, his hair also golden and worn long, his expression pleased and a little dazed, whether from champagne or the prospect of matrimony, Emily couldn’t guess. With difficulty, Emily took Jane’s hands and wished her every happiness. Her fiancé pressed Emily’s hand with such vigor that Emily was glad when he released it.
The more she told herself not to recall it, the more she thought of her own engagement and its celebration. She would find a chair set against the wall, where she would sit with the married women, the true widows, and the dowagers who had outlived marriage. And she would not cry, not in public, not at a joyous celebration.
As she made her way past the punchbowl, Camilla grasped her hand. “There you are,” she said. Her color was very high. She held a young man by the other hand. Under thick brows, his eyes were dark and keen, and his beard surrounded a mouth set in the faintest smile. Beneath his frock coat, where an old-fashioned Carolina man would wear a neckcloth and a fashionable one would tie a slender cravat, he wore a loose and flowing scarf in an astonishingly bright red.
“Emily!” cried Camilla, in such an unrestrained voice that Emily wondered how much champagne she had sipped. “This is my naughty cousin Joshua, who ran away to study at Harvard College in Boston and stayed north to live in Ohio.”
Emily barely had time to say, “Pleased to make your acquaintance,” before Camilla interrupted her. “But I’m going to dance with him first, and after that, he can flirt with whoever he wants to!”
Emily thought, I can’t bear it. I can’t breathe in here. She didn’t hasten, but she made her way to the door and down the great staircase to the front door. The first-floor piazza was still crowded with arrivals as she slipped onto the grounds. She had been at the Aiken house in daylight, and she knew what she sought. In the side garden, under the live oak tree, was a wrought iron bench, where she collapsed gratefully. She rested her hand on the metal, which was pleasantly cool to the touch in the fall night. She breathed in the air, scented with pine and the gardenia in its last moment of bloom. This late in the season, the crickets had quieted, but the swallows were out, swooping against the indigo sky, and the owls called, their cry eerie and reassuring at the same time. The waxing moon cast a silvery light on the gray bark of the live oak, turning its leaves to silver as well.
She sat long enough to cool her face and calm the desire to sob. She promised herself she would go back soon. It wasn’t seemly to attend a dance and sit alone in the garden. That was worse than sitting by the wall.
In the faint light, she could see a frock coat but not a face. The voice was a surprise. “Pardon me,” he said. “I didn’t think that anyone else would be here. I didn’t mean to disturb you.”
It was Camilla’s cousin Joshua.
“I needed a breath of air. And a moment of quiet, too,” Emily said.
“It’s quite a press in there.”
Emily said, “The whole county knows Miss Aiken and rejoices with her.”
“Shall we make a proper introduction?” he asked.
She rose and held out her hand. “Miss Emily Jarvie,” she said.
He pressed her hand with dry, confident fingers. “Mr. Joshua Aiken.”
She smoothed her skirt, readying herself to sit, and invited him to join her. The bench was wide enough for decorum. He didn’t press her in any way. She asked, “How are you connected with the Aiken family?”
“Oh, a dog-and-cat kind of cousin. We’re Sumter County people from way back. My father has a place near the Kershaw County border. Three hundred acres, cotton and corn.”
“What keeps you in Ohio, Mr. Aiken? Since no one grows cotton there.”
He laughed. “There are corn farmers but not in Cincinnati, where I live. I’m the editor of a ladies’ magazine called Hearth and Home.”
“I don’t know it.”
“Ah, that’s our trouble. We model ourselves on Godey’s, and as my publisher is fond of reminding me, they goad us to our efforts for greater circulation every month.” He laughed. “We publish news of the latest in fashion and aids to household management, but we also try to publish literature. Stories and sketches. That’s my purview, since I studied literature at Harvard College.”
“What do you read, Mr. Aiken?”
“I keep my eye on the newest books. That tells me what our readers prefer. We can’t pay the best-known writers as much as Godey’s or Harper’s, so I strive to find writers who will interest our readers but cost us less.”
She said, “I love books, but I never thought of them as a business.”
“Ah, shame on me for talking about business at an engagement party. I’m always delighted to find someone who loves books. What do you prefer to read, Miss Jarvie?”
“I like novels best, even though some people think they’re trifling,” she said. “I read history, too.” She thought again of Caroline, her face alight as she held a book in her hands.
“Do you write, Miss Jarvie?”
“I keep a diary,” she said, blushing.
“What do you write in your diary?”
She met his eyes, which were very dark in the moon’s faint light. “Whatever I see. Whatever I think. And whatever I feel.” She admitted, “I have no one to tell. So I write it instead.”
He said gently, “It’s often lonely to see keenly. And to feel keenly. As many writers do.”
If she let him go on, he’d start to flirt with her. She asked, “Why did you leave South Carolina, Mr. Aiken?”
“My father keeps control of the place, and my brothers are waiting for him to let it go so they’ll have something to do. I watched them fall into idleness and dissipation, and I didn’t want that for myself. I wanted to be occupied. And that occupation turned out to be literature and Hearth and Home in Cincinnati.”
This was easier, asking him about himself, deflecting from her own desire to confide. “How do you find Cincinnati?”
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Even in the faint light, she saw him smile. It was a broad, sunny smile, showing strong, white teeth. “It’s an impatient kind of place, Miss Jarvie. Not just the weather, although I’m glad of a wool coat in the winter. They’re northerners, and they do everything quickly. The way they walk and their speech. They have business to transact, and they hurry to do it. Even the married women are brisk in the streets and the shops. And there are many unmarried women who work for a living, and they take their business as seriously as the men do.”
She thought of a cold place, full of wool-clad people bent on commerce. She asked, “Are there Negroes in Cincinnati?”
“Of course. My barber is a man of color. He’s intelligent and jolly with his customers. And brisk!” He laughed, softening his words. “He can’t make any money shaving me, so he’s concocted an unguent for my hair and my beard and profits by selling me that.” He stroked his beard, which was well-groomed and a little bristly, despite the unguent.
She felt a little uneasy to hear about a free black man who prospered. But weren’t there barbers in Charleston who were free persons of color? She deflected again. “Mr. Aiken, I believe you’re becoming a northerner, to talk so bluntly about your barber and your beard with a lady.”
“Or a man without manners, perhaps. It’s such a pleasure to talk to a lady who likes to read and write that I may have forgotten myself. I hope I haven’t offended you.”
It was impossible to be offended by this cheerful, businesslike Carolina transplant who loved literature and made a living selling it. “No, Mr. Aiken, you haven’t.”
“You look a little chilled, Miss Jarvie. Would you like to go inside?”
“I would, even though I can’t dance since I’m still in mourning.”
He said, “The Aikens told me about your uncle. I didn’t want to be blunt about that. It was recent, I hear.”
“In August.” She met his eyes and said, “Did they tell you about the other loss? My betrothed?”
He returned her gaze. “Even less reason to be blunt,” he said softly. “What a terrible loss, Miss Jarvie, and how difficult to come here with your heart still heavy.”
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