Charleston (14 page)

Then it was over. Early Monday the great man and his party took the road for Savannah. Edward rose in a good mood, though he found himself belching and breaking wind as a consequence of all the rich food and fine wine consumed during the week. He could no longer roister as he had in the old days.

On a brisk walk from home to his law office, he focused on a complicated legal matter he was trying to unsnarl. It involved two sisters and their avaricious husbands. Both sisters claimed the family's original headright acreage in Saxe Gotha Township. Edward was mulling a compromise to propose when he accidentally collided with a woman in a mobcap that shadowed her garishly rouged face. He presumed she was just another of the drabs who solicited in public. “Beg pardon.” He tipped his hat and hurried by.

“I know you.” Her cry stopped him, swung him around. “Edward Bell.”

“I'm afraid I can't reciprocate, madam. I'm sure we haven't met before.”

She stepped closer. Along with the scent of cloves she was chewing, he got a whiff of rotten teeth. “Bridgit Lark's my name. I know it was you killed William.”

“William…?”

“My husband. I know it was you. He feared you would, because of military action he took against you.”

Edward's stupefaction changed to ire. “Military action? Better to use the word
murder
.”

“And you repaid it in kind.” She spoke so loudly, people on the footpath stared.

Pierced by guilt, Edward replied awkwardly. “You've no proof of that, madam.”

“I don't need any. I've taught my son to remember your name and what you did. You'll pay for killing my William, you and your tribe, don't think you won't.”

And she was gone, leaving Edward speechless in the sunshine.

Admiration for all things French consumed the nation. Lafayette was venerated. Marburg sold many copies of
The Rights of Man,
Tom Paine's tract extolling the ideals of the French Revolution. Edward stayed up late reading it and next day asked Joanna to fashion a tricolor cockade. He pinned it to a new Parisian-style hat, tall and tapering, with a round brim. For wear at the wharf she made a pair of white trousers with thin vertical stripes of red and blue. His Fortnightly Club celebrated the anniversary of the fall of the Bastille with a special dinner on July 14.

Not all Charlestonians caught the revolutionary spirit. Archibald Lescock paraded in the apparel of an
elegant,
an antirevolutionist. Edward encountered him at a coffeehouse, resplendent in an emerald silk frock coat with a high turndown collar. He wore enough musk scent for a woman.

Lescock said plans were being made to reopen the racetrack north of the original city wall. He would pit his mare against Edward's stallion at the first opportunity. “What a pleasure it will be to beat a sansculotte,” he said, smirking and tapping Edward's striped trousers with his weighted stick.

Edward decided to prepare for the race, whenever it might occur. He began taking Joanna and Edgar to Malvern on weekends. There he saddled Prince Mahmoud and raced him along the country roads. The white Arabian was a big animal, strong but high-strung. A sudden noise, a flash of lightning, could throw him off stride, even make him balk. When he was fearless, he ran faster than any horse Edward had ever ridden.

 

A man named Joseph Vesey came to Bell's Bridge to sell cordage to a master whose schooner had lost much of it in a fierce Atlantic blow. Edward knew Vesey slightly. He'd captained slave ships in the seventies and eighties. Now, in his middle years, he was retired in Charleston, where he wholesaled marine goods. He owned a substantial home in one of the new northern boroughs, and several slaves.

When Edward arrived at the busy wharf after two hours at his law office, he noticed a black man of twenty-five or so, with smooth, almost Grecian features, lounging on a bollard reading a book—a bold thing to do in public. The young man wore breeches and a frilled shirt, obviously hand-me-down.

The young man raised his head as Edward approached; gave him a frank stare. There was neither friendliness nor animosity in it, just careful appraisal from large dark eyes. Edward wasn't one to raise an alarm or issue a reprimand, but Negroes didn't look at white men that way if they wanted to avoid the workhouse.

“Who's that colored man outside?” he asked Simon Buckles in the office.

“Cap'n Vesey owns him. I talked to him a little.” Big Simon scratched his luxuriant red beard. “Can't say as I took to him. Pert, he is. A sleeky sort.”

“Sleeky? Stop that damned Scots cant or I'll come after you with a
chabouk
.”

“What's a
chabouk
?”

“Oriental horsewhip. I asked Marburg to find me some suitably obscure words for retaliation. What's the meaning of
sleeky
?”

“Sly.”

“Well, kindly say as much. Speak the king's English.”

“I dinna have any love for English kings, but I'll try, to keep the chabouk off my arse,” Buckles said, grinning.

A few days later, paying a call on Marburg's shop, Edward was surprised to bump into the black man coming out the door. Captain Vesey's slave gave him a blank look,
yet Edward had a feeling the man recognized him and had stored the moment away for some future use.

Marburg was busy cleaning his shelves and bins with a feather duster. Edward mentioned the Negro. “I saw him at the Bridge not long ago. What do you know about him?”

“Name's Denmark. He's a bright one. Reads and writes English, French, some Danish, Portuguese, a little Arabic, and speaks Gullah. He comes in to examine my Bibles.” Marburg kept a suitably ecumenical supply of religious literature. “Says he'll buy a new one someday. Says he'll buy or earn his freedom too. He told me a lot, he's a talkative sort.”

Curious, Edward said, “And?”

“Vesey bought him about twelve years ago, in the Danish Virgin Islands, where the lad was born. Later the captain sold him to a sugar planter on Saint-Domingue.
3

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Present-day Haiti

“Vesey took him back aboard and carried him on voyages to West Africa. There he picked up languages so fast, Vesey found him highly useful in negotiations at the slave factories. Vesey brought him here when he retired, and changed his name from Telemaque to Denmark. He's friendly enough, but his taste in Scripture is peculiar.”

“For instance?”

From the shelf of religious material Marburg drew down an Old Testament. He showed Edward a page from the book of Joshua. “Sixth chapter, twenty-first verse. It's his favorite.”

Scowling, Edward closed the book. “He cited this to you, a white man?”

“He did. Bit unsettling, isn't it?”

“He'll be in trouble with the authorities if he isn't careful.”

“I think he's too clever for that.”

“Sleeky,” Edward said without thinking.

 

In early September the ardor for the French Revolution cooled unexpectedly. Trading ships from the Caribbean brought disturbing news from the island of Saint-Domingue. For decades nearly three quarters of a million slaves had worked the coffee and sugar plantations of the
grands blancs,
the white landowners. Recently, some had run away to the inland mountains and forests. Led by a strange cadre that included disciples of voodoo and educated
affranchisés
—free blacks, the island's third caste—the runaways, or
macrons,
burned outlying plantations and butchered the owners. Within a month ships from southern waters brought a few French refugees. Then boatloads of them arrived. They came with wives, husbands, children, the few possessions left to them—and stories of atrocities.

 

The Fortnightly Club rotated its meetings among the homes of twenty-two members. The evenings varied: sometimes a member reviewed a book of the moment, or presented a paper on a learned subject. Occasionally an invited guest spoke. Whatever the program, members could count on three hours of intelligent masculine company, and good Madeira.

Edward's turn as host came in March of 1792. Marburg invited a refugee with whom he'd become acquainted at the shop. Emile Epernay was a cadaverous middle-aged gentleman with a shock of white hair, a white goatee, and a yellowish, haunted face. An air of sadness, even failure, seemed to sit on his shoulders. Marburg introduced him almost apologetically.

“Monsieur Epernay is establishing himself as a dancing master and teacher of French. He comes tonight to tell us of recent events in his homeland.”

Epernay had a good command of English. “I was born on Saint-Domingue. I inherited four hundred acres near the northern settlement of Limb. Some of the richest coffee lands on the island.

“I increased the holdings to one thousand acres, building a lucrative trade with Marseilles and the French Channel ports. When the trouble came, inspired by the damned lovers of Madame Guillotine in Paris, all but ten of my one hundred slaves deserted to join the savages who subsequently attacked the plantation. We could not stand against them. We ran to a wood, and from there I watched the whole sum of my life devoured by flames. All over the island fields like mine were torched. Saint-Domingue became an inferno. Fires were still burning when we took ship.”

Epernay, his wife, and three unmarried daughters made their way to the city of Cap Français on the coast. “Even there the horde of godless brutes followed us. They raped and burned beneath a ghastly standard—a pike, upon which was impaled the body of a white infant. A new one every few days.” A club member seated near Edward covered his mouth and excused himself.

“When they came to the Cap, we turned them back with our weapons, but at dreadful cost. A thousand fine plantations destroyed. Two thousand white men, women, and children slaughtered, and perhaps five times as many Negroes. Which is hardly enough to pay for the damage they wrought,” he said with a vicious expression.

“Had my wife not escaped with her casket of jewels, I could not have paid the outrageous price demanded for passage to Charleston. I was one of the fortunate, but my blessed island is destroyed. Most who run amok there are ignorant and superstitious, but some are educated, hence more dangerous. A former house servant named Toussaint L'Ouverture was taught to read and write by owners whom he subsequently warned in time for them to escape. He is a student of the writings and campaigns of Julius Caesar.”

At the end of Epernay's monologue one of the members said, “We are heartily glad you escaped, sir. We welcome
you to a new life in America. Thankfully, we do not have to worry about events so far away.”

“You think not, monsieur? Count all the black sailors coming and going in this port. Ideas travel swiftly on sailing ships. Be wary, lest you have another Saint-Domingue in Charleston. I urge you to be vigilant. Arm yourselves in your homes. Organize a civil guard. Prepare for insurrection as though it were a certainty. Primitive Africans are not to be trusted. As a race they are barbaric.”

Or is it the way they've been sold and subjugated?
Edward thought. Joanna had changed him in many ways.

 

In the beautiful spring of 1792 Edward raced Prince Mahmoud every weekend. One hot Sunday afternoon in May a rattlesnake wriggled into the road ahead of horse and rider. The Arabian reacted, rearing, neighing, throwing Edward out of the saddle.

The steed's slashing forehoofs cut the snake in half. Edward lay in the dust with his left leg twisted and, as his Charleston physician told him later that day, his right arm broken. After setting, it required a sling, which placed the burden of all of his writing on his law clerk and Simon Buckles.

On the Friday after the accident Simon came into the office without his usual cheerful expression. “I chanced to be over to Rhett's Wharf an hour ago. The brig
Rover,
out of New Providence Island, Nassau, has just put in.”

“What of it?”

“The passenger list excited some comment. It was called to my attention that Mrs. Adrian Bell and son have arrived in Charleston.”

Edward wore a black sling on his right arm. He complained to Joanna that given the sling and his limp, he felt like Job. What else did the Almighty have in store? Boils?

She laughed at his conceit, kissed his forehead, and said he should be ashamed of such dark thoughts. As a family they were secure, well provided for thanks to the Bridge and his small practice. Life was good. As always her affection charmed him out of his funk. He made love to her twice that night after the household went to sleep.

To replace his first clerk, who had married and hied off to Augusta to set up his own office, Edward hired Simon Buckles's second child and oldest son, Argyll. The young man weighed eighteen stone at least, his corpulence all the more evident because the top of his head barely reached Edward's shoulder. He waddled rather than walked. A seamstress made his clothes, because no fashionable tailor would sew such tentlike garments. Like his father, he had a sunny disposition, a quick mind, and a fierce Presbyterian bent for hard work.

“Argyll,” Edward said one morning in May, “enough time has passed since my sister-in-law's return. We should clear up the matter of Prosperity Hall. Kindly take this letter to Legare Street. I'd like her to call here.” He wasn't looking forward to it. “Arrange a day and time before you return.”

Argyll departed, creaking the floorboards mightily.

The appointment was set for Saturday morning. Edward
rather expected his sister-in-law to present a picture of impoverished gentility after her exile. He was startled when she appeared pink and healthy, and only slightly heavier than when he'd seen her last. Her clothes suggested that Adrian had indeed made a profitable start in cotton before his untimely death. Her frock was the latest style: cotton, with a narrow vertical stripe of royal blue, enhanced by a sash of matching blue satin and worn with flat slippers. Fewer undergarments made a slimmer silhouette and more clearly revealed the line of her breasts. Her blond hair hung to her shoulders in flowing curls set off by a white gauze turban sporting an ostrich plume. Poor women did not wear the
chemise à l'anglaise
or its expensive accompaniments.

She brought her boy, Simms, to the office. Simms was eight. He resembled his mother with one unfortunate exception. Where Lydia's eyes were round and blue and enticing, Simms's blue eyes bulged slightly, giving the illusion of two small bird's eggs protruding from his face.

He suffered from a wheezy cough. More time outdoors would cure that, Edward thought; the boy was white as a maiden's drawers. Blond curls and fair brows only enhanced his air of hothouse fragility. Edward left him on a stool in the outer office, there to pester Argyll while the adults conferred with the door closed.

Lydia took the visitor's chair. Edward still saw much to admire in her soft and buxom beauty, but now, with Joanna as a comparison, he wondered how he'd ever been in love with her, or come running back to Charleston for fear of losing her.

He again offered condolences on her double loss. Her only response was a flat “Thank you.” In her eyes he saw animosity, or thought he did. Perhaps he imagined it because of her letter.

She asked how he'd broken his arm. He explained, concluding, “Damned inconvenient, it's the hand I use most.”

They exchanged a few bland pleasantries about the changes in Charleston: the welcome disappearance of war damage, the new wealth showing up in expensive homes and fancy coaches of a rising cotton elite. “Prosperity Hall
would be excellent for raising cotton,” he said to introduce his subject.

“You forget that I no longer own the property, Edward.”

“Not quite true. Do you recall my letter? I believe I informed you that I managed to have Adrian's plantation transferred to the amercement list, rather than offered for sale as confiscated land.”

“Oh, yes, I read that. I didn't understand it.”

Patiently, he told her about the punitive tax, twelve percent of Prosperity Hall's assessed value, awaiting payment. He opened a large vellum folder, showed a sheet of figures that Argyll had prepared. “This is the significant amount.” He turned the sheet around so she could read it. “Can you afford to pay it?”

She studied the paper, then sat back and brushed some invisible speck of dirt or piece of lint off the upper curve of her breast. The act was somehow provocative and stirred Edward in a guilty way. He expected that it was deliberate on her part.

She smiled for the first time. “Yes, I believe I can. Most of my funds remain on deposit in a bank in St. Lucia, but I intended to transfer them. It appears that doing so promptly would be advantageous.”

“Yes. The plantation's valuable. With river frontage you're in a prime position to barge cotton down here for shipment. Prices are high at the moment. The mill owners in England have forgotten we were ever enemies. Their demand is voracious.”

“You're very generous.”

“Lydia, he was my brother. The war pushed us apart, but family ties aren't easily sundered.”

A new, husky note came into her voice. “Was it only the war?”

Somehow a green chameleon had found its way into his office and was climbing a cliff of shelved books. In a patch of sunlight the little creature rested on top of a fat, boring volume on notes and bills. It inflated its throat into a vivid pink bubble. The mating season had come.

He noticed light perspiration on Lydia's upper lip. “I don't think it's useful to go over that,” he said.

“You no longer have any feeling for me?”

“You're my sister-in-law. I have the highest regard—”

She reached across the desk to trap his left hand. Her fingers were warm and strong. “I'm not talking about that kind of feeling. You take my meaning.”

“I do, but we mustn't revisit the past.”

“Because you're afraid of the outcome if we do?” Beyond the door the boy Simms coughed loudly enough to frighten the chameleon into hiding. While Edward searched for the right response, his eye raked the desk to see whether there were any lethal objects in view. Trying not to appear deliberate, he tapped his fingertips on the vellum folder, then casually withdrew a pointed letter opener from her side of the desk.

“Lydia, there's no profit for either of us in answering such a question.” Her sudden flush suggested anger. “Regarding the amercement and restoration of Prosperity Hall, I'll be pleased to handle all the legal work at no expense to you.”

“And then we're quits?”

“Why, no. I hope you might visit our family someday soon.”

“You're happy, are you?”

“Very,” he said, truthfully.

“Well, of course I have a vague memory of your wife, but I'd love to renew the acquaintance.” Absolutely untrue, he thought. “We'll have ample opportunity. If Prosperity Hall passes into my hands again, I'll make Charleston my permanent home. I'll see you often.”

Those four words, spoken with a voluptuous little smile, made silent promises: she wouldn't give up on him. She had every confidence that he would succumb eventually. His heart raced.

Lydia rose, came around the desk to clasp his left hand again. “Thank you for your kindness. I'm sorry if circumstances led me to be harsh with you in the past. I will endeavor to remedy that.”

All he could say to shorten the moment was “Allow me to show you out.”

He stepped in front of her; they were very close. She
touched his chin, brought her moist mouth near his, whispered, “Dear man. It could have been so different. It still could be.”

Before he could reply, she opened the door and cried, “Poor thing, Mama's here,” to her coughing boy. She bade Argyll good morning and left without a backward look.

God, why had she come back to stir old feelings he didn't want? He felt angry, with her and with himself. He remembered the little chameleon lost somewhere on the high shelves. In a way Lydia was a chameleon, unpredictably changeable. There was one difference: a real chameleon was harmless.