North and South: The North and South Trilogy Page 33

  “I’m not accusing you of anything, my darling. I only want you to see things clearly. You’re more reasonable than—” She was about to say “your father” but hastily changed course. “—than most. There is such terrible illogic in the South’s attitude about the whole system. You hand a man a new shirt every Christmas but deprive him of his liberty, and you expect him to be grateful. You expect the world to applaud!”

  “Madeline, you’re talking about a man who is—”

  “Inferior.” She held up both hands. “I’ve heard that excuse a thousand times. I simply don’t believe it. There are black men on Resolute with better minds than Justin’s—they’re just not permitted or encouraged to use them. But let that go. Assume for a second that there is some truth in the excuse and whites are, in some inexplicable fashion, superior. How does that justify robbing a man of his freedom? Shouldn’t it instead create an obligation to help him succeed because he’s less fortunate? Wouldn’t that be the Christian response?”

  “Damned if I know.” Orry rose and slapped the slender book against his thigh. “You get me mightily confused with all this talk.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She wasn’t, though. She was pleased. Orry wasn’t attempting to deny or refute her arguments. That might mean he was thinking about them. Perhaps she’d never be able to convince him that slavery was wrong, but if she could plant a doubt or two, she would consider it an accomplishment.

  He was silent for a time. Then he shrugged. “I’m not smart enough to thread my way through all those arguments. Besides, I thought we were going to read.”

  He showed her the gold-stamped spine of the book that had arrived on yesterday’s boat from Charleston: The Raven and Other Poems.

  Madeline arranged her skirts and sat beside him. “E. A. Poe. Francis LaMotte’s wife mentioned him last week. She read a couple of his fantastic tales and absolutely hated them. She said he belonged in a lunatic asylum.”

  For the first time that day, Orry laughed. “Typical reaction to a Yankee author. I’m afraid there’s no chance of locking him up. He died last year in Baltimore. He was only forty, but a notorious drunkard. There have been some articles about him in the Southern Literary Messenger. He was the editor for a while. What’s interesting to me is his West Point background.”

  “Was he a cadet?”

  “For one term. The fall of 1830, I think. Apparently he had a brilliant future. He was in the first section of every course. But something went wrong, and he was court-martialed for gross neglect of duty. Just prior to his dismissal, he was spending nearly all his time at Benny Haven’s.”

  “Drinking?”

  “I suppose—though the real attraction at Benny’s has always been the food. You wouldn’t understand how a plate of fried eggs could taste like heaven. You’ve never dined in the cadet mess hall.”

  A soft note of reminiscence had come into his voice. His gaze rested somewhere above the marsh. How much he misses it, she thought, and slipped her arm through his. She always sat on his right side so that she wouldn’t accidentally call attention to his loss.

  “Anyway”—he opened the book—“I’m no judge of poetry, but I do like some of these. They have a strange, marvelous music in them. Shall we start with this one?”

  The title of the verse was “Annabel Lee.” She began:

  “It was many and many a year ago,

  In a kingdom by the sea,

  That a maiden there lived whom you may know

  By the name of Annabel Lee.”

  Her pause at the end of the line was his cue to read.

  “And this maiden she lived with no other thought

  Than to love and be loved by me.”

  By now they were comfortable reading poetry aloud. They had started a couple of months ago, when Orry had surprised her by bringing a book. Some of the poetry wasn’t very good, but they enjoyed the ritual, and once again today, responding to the verse, she felt a quiver of desire.

  The physical reaction had startled her the first time it happened. Now she looked forward to it with delicious anticipation. The soft alternation of their voices took on a kind of sexual rhythm, as if they were possessing each other, making love to each other, in the only way that was possible. Each of them held the book; the back of her left hand brushed his knuckles. The contact seemed to generate heat all through her. She turned slightly so that she could look at him while they read on.

  The anonymous lover in the poem lost his Annabel Lee. They experienced that loss as the stanzas swept on toward a climax. Her voice grew husky.

  “For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams

  Of the beautiful Annabel Lee—”

  Orry’s voice quickened the pace.

  “And the stars never rise but I feel the bright eyes

  Of the beautiful Annabel Lee.”

  Her eyes flickered back and forth from the page to his face. Under her layers of clothing her breasts ached. Her loins felt molten.

  “And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side

  Of my darling—my darling—”

  She stumbled and had to glance down hastily in order to finish the line.

  “My life, and my bride—”

  “‘In the sepulcher there by the sea,’” he read. “‘In her tomb by the sounding sea.’”

  He closed the book and gripped her hand. They sat in silence, gazing at each other. Then, no longer able to restrain herself, she flung her arms around his neck with a little cry and brought her open mouth to his.

  Orry rode home in the early dusk of the February afternoon. He felt as he always did after meeting Madeline. Their time together was never long enough. And reading poetry was no substitute for loving her properly, as God had intended when he designed man and woman.

  Today they had gone to the brink, almost surrendered to the hunger overwhelming them. Only extreme restraint, a herculean struggle to master their emotions, had kept them from tumbling into the brown grass beside the chapel foundation. Because they had come so close, Orry felt more lonely and frustrated than ever as he swung up the lane and turned his horse over to one of the house servants. The slave smiled and greeted him. Orry answered with a curt nod. What was the nigra really thinking? You hand me a shirt every Christmas and rob me of my liberty and expect me to kiss your hand. I’d sooner break it off. Damn Madeline for filling his head with doubts and questions about the system he had accepted as moral and proper for most of his life.

  He stalked into the library and flung back the draperies to admit the faint rays of the sunset. It was torment to keep seeing her, and torment to think of giving her up. What was he to do?

  He poured a heavy drink of whiskey. The last light was going. One by one highlights disappeared from the brasswork of his Army sword scabbard, which hung from a clothes stand he had placed in a corner. His dark blue uniform coat was draped over the stand. Not the coat he was wearing when his arm got blown off, needless to say; this one had both sleeves. The brass buttons, as well as the pommel of his sheathed sword, had a greenish cast, he noticed. Here and there patches of mold speckled the coat.

  He sank into his favorite chair, brooding over the mementos. He ought to get rid of them. They were constant reminders of his thwarted ambition. They were slowly going to ruin, just like his own life. They had no purpose, and neither did he. They existed, that was all.

  God, if only that day at Churubusco had been different. If only he had visited New Orleans when he was younger and chanced on Madeline there. If only! Somewhere there had to be an antidote for the poison of “if only.” But what was it?

  He stumbled to the cabinet to fill his glass a second time. Upstairs his sisters were quarreling. They always seemed to be these days. They had reached the right age. He shut the windows and sat drinking and listening to the sound of phantom drums. Finally the uniform faded away in the dark.

  Clarissa opened the door around eleven and discovered him passed out on the floor. Two servants carried him to
his bed.

  Although Ashton and Brett had reached adolescence, they still shared a spacious bedroom on the second floor. Ashton, fourteen and already a fully developed, flamboyantly beautiful young woman, constantly complained about the arrangement. Why did she have to surrender her privacy? Why did she have to live with, as she put it, “a twelve-year-old baby who’s still flat as a board?”

  Tonight the room was exceptionally warm. Ashton, who slept in the bed nearest the window, kept muttering about her discomfort. Kept puffing her pillow noisily, and pressing the back of her wrist to her damp forehead, and sighing.

  Finally, drowsy and irritated, her sister said: “Oh, for heaven’s sake, hush up and let me sleep.”

  “I can’t. I’m tight as a drum inside.”

  “Ashton, I don’t understand you sometimes.”

  “Naturally not,” her sister huffed. “You’re just a baby. Baby white skin and baby white bloomers. You’ll probably be like that till you’re an old woman.”

  “Ooo,” Brett said, and flung a pillow. Of all the insults Ashton heaped on her, none bothered her more than references to her failure thus far to show a single sign of what some called woman’s curse of shame. Once a month Ashton pranced around the room to be sure her sister saw her stained pantalets. This never failed to humiliate Brett, as did her lack of physical development.

  Of course she wasn’t sure she wanted to grow up. Not if it meant she must roll her eyes and act sugary and coy around every man under thirty. She was positive she didn’t want to grow up if it meant cozying up to someone like lawyer Huntoon.

  The thought of him gave Brett one of her few opportunities for reprisal. In imitation of her sister’s sweetest manner, she said, “I should think you would be blissfully happy tonight. James Huntoon is calling tomorrow—he and all those politicians Papa’s been hobnobbing with lately. You fancy Mr. Huntoon, don’t you?”

  Ashton threw the pillow right back. “I think he’s a toad, and you know it. He’s an old man. Twenty, nearly. This is how I feel about him.”

  She stuck out her tongue and retched four times.

  Brett hugged the pillow to her stomach, overcome with laughter. In the low country, parents still decided which young men were suitable companions for their daughters. Ashton was old enough to have several beaux, but so far Huntoon was the only one who had received Tillet Main’s permission to call.

  Brett wanted to continue the teasing, but a noise from outside drew both girls to the window. United by their curiosity, they watched a ghostly figure on horseback gallop up the lane, flash through a patch of moonlight, and disappear in the direction of the stable.

  “That was Cousin Charles,” Brett said in an awed voice.

  “’Course it was,” Ashton said. “He must have been off sparking Sue Marie Smith. Either that or one of the nigger wenches.” The idea made Brett blush.

  Ashton giggled. “If Whitney Smith ever finds out that his cousin Sue Marie is fooling with Charles, there’ll be the devil to pay. Sue Marie and Whitney are engaged.”

  “When are you and Huntoon announcing your engagement?”

  Ashton yanked her sister’s hair. “When hell freezes!”

  Brett threw a grazing punch at Ashton’s shoulder, then retreated to her bed. Ashton faced the moonlit window, rubbing her palms back and forth across her stomach and wrinkling her nightgown in what Brett considered a perfectly shameless way.

  “I guess Sue Marie can’t help herself with Cousin Charles. Or any boy. They say her drawers are as hot as a basket of Fourth of July squibs. I know how she feels,” Ashton concluded with a soulful sigh. “You wouldn’t, though.”

  Brett punched her pillow and turned away, more hurt than angry. Ashton eclipsed her in wit, and beauty, and accomplishments. No doubt she always would.

  Ashton had more courage, too. She took chances. In that way she was a lot like Cousin Charles. Maybe lawyer Huntoon would tame her down. Brett hoped so. She liked her sister, she supposed, but sometimes Ashton’s antics just plain wore her out.

  James Huntoon wore round spectacles and an invisible mantle of righteousness. Although he was only six years older than Ashton, he already displayed jowls and the beginning of a paunch. The facial fat spoiled a countenance that was otherwise handsome.

  Huntoon’s family had been in the state a long time, but it lacked about fifty years of being as old as that of the Mains. The first Huntoon in Carolina, an immigrant who could neither read nor write, had settled in the hills up country. A member of the next generation had discovered that being an ignorant dirt farmer in the midlands was not the path to prominence and had removed to the coast, where sharp dealing and some lucky land acquisitions had generated substantial wealth within two more generations. The Huntoons intermarried with several distinguished families and in this way gradually acquired a pedigree.

  Most of the family acreage was gone now, a casualty of the same peril that had ruined the LaMottes—bad management coupled with a too-lavish style of living. James Huntoon’s elderly parents subsisted on the charity of relatives. They occupied the family’s run-down plantation house, attended by five Negroes too old to find other purchasers. It had been clear to James from very early in life that if he wanted to survive and prosper, he could not live on the land.

  Fortunately the Huntoons still possessed an impressive set of friends and acquaintances; in South Carolina the fact that a family had lost its wealth did not necessarily destroy its social standing. Only unacceptable behavior was certain to do that. So James knew all the right people to call on when he set out to make his way in Charleston. He read law in one of the leading firms and had recently established his own practice in the city.

  Tillet thought most of the Huntoon clan unworthy of notice; while members of other important families worried about the state’s future, the Huntoons nattered about the past and behaved as if the crushing problems of the present didn’t exist. But Tillet sensed potential in James, even if the young man did disdain the hard work sometimes demanded of a lawyer. Certainly Huntoon’s contacts throughout the state gave him every chance for success.

  Huntoon also liked politics and was an effective orator. Philosophically, he was aligned with those who were eager to see the state and the region assert independence in an increasingly hostile world. One such was Robert Barnwell Rhett, the influential editor of the Charleston Mercury. Huntoon’s mother was related to Rhett by marriage.

  Huntoon had first seen Ashton last winter at a theater in Charleston. Clarissa had brought her daughters to town for the social season, and the family had occupied a box for a performance by the noted actor Frederic Stanhope Hill. He routinely included Charleston on his tours, as did most theatrical luminaries.

  The moment the young lawyer set eyes on Ashton Main, he was struck by a consuming lust. She was lovely and, though still young, already voluptuous. Huntoon sent a card to Clarissa requesting permission to call whenever the parents deemed their daughter was of suitable age.

  Several months and one birthday went by before Clarissa responded with a short, polite letter. Other girls began receiving callers at fourteen, so she and Tillet would not gainsay Ashton. But she put the would-be suitor on notice. “My husband agrees with the low-country maxim which states that a woman’s name should appear in the papers twice only—once when she marries and once when she dies. I mention this so as to completely inform you about his attitude toward improper behavior of any kind.”

  Duly warned, Huntoon initiated his courtship with traditional gifts—flowers first, then kid gloves and French chocolates. He had now progressed to visiting alone with Ashton indoors for short periods. To be alone with her elsewhere—to go riding without a chaperone, for example—was as yet out of the question. Huntoon did his best to bridle his lust. One day, if everything went just right, that splendid body would be his.

  He had to admit Ashton frightened him a little. She wasn’t outwardly unconventional, yet she possessed a saucy boldness not typical of girls of her age and
station. He did admire her regal air, which some called arrogance. He admired Tillet Main’s wealth, too.

  As for the others in the family, he was unimpressed. Clarissa was a harmless old soul, and Ashton’s little sister horridly drab. Huntoon shrank from any contact with Orry—a one-armed ghoul—and as for Cooper Main, who went strutting about Charleston as if he actually had some right to call himself a Southerner, Huntoon believed he should be run out of the state on a rail. The four gentlemen who had accompanied Huntoon to Mont Royal this morning shared that view. One was Rhett of the Mercury.

  “The convention has been called for June,” Huntoon said to their host. “In Nashville. Delegates from all the Southern states will attend for the purpose of appraising Senator Clay’s resolutions and determining a common response.”

  “June, eh?” Tillet scratched his chin. “Won’t they vote on the resolutions by then?”

  Another of the visitors chuckled. “I wouldn’t say it’s likely given the present split in the Congress.”

  Huntoon’s lips pursed, an unconscious reaction to the scrutiny he was receiving from Orry, whom Tillet had somehow persuaded to come to this meeting. Orry demonstrated his reluctance by sitting slouched in a corner with his legs crossed, a silent observer.

  Why was the damned ghoul watching him? Orry had nothing to say about his sister’s beaux. Huntoon concluded that the attention was a product of simple dislike. It was mutual.

  “Should this Nashville meeting be held at all?” Tillet questioned. “You told me it isn’t an official convention of the party—”

  Rhett stood suddenly. The fifty-year-old editor dominated the gathering, as he usually dominated any he attended. “Tillet, my friend, you’ve been away from public affairs too long.”

  “Busy making a living, Robert.”

  The others laughed. Rhett continued, “You know as well as I that for twenty years and more our adversaries have preached a doctrine of animosity toward the South. They have injured our sensibilities with their lies and systematically robbed us with their peculiar tax on Southern agriculture, the tariff. What’s more, many of our worst enemies can be found within the ranks of the Democratic party. Hence the party in South Carolina has slowly withdrawn, until it can be said that we are merely in sometime alliance with the national organization rather than active members of it. In no other way can we express our antipathy for the party’s views and practices.”