Charleston (15 page)

Edward had no secrets from his wife, except that concerning the death of William Lark, which he'd never mentioned. Joanna knew about his past infatuation with his sister-in-law, and accepted his word that she had long ago replaced Lydia and claimed all his affection. She wasn't unwilling to ask Lydia and Simms to supper, though not enthusiastic either. A week after the conversation in the office she sent an invitation to Legare Street. Lydia didn't respond.

Two more weeks passed, while Edward assembled papers for Lydia's signature. He sent Argyll into the pouring rain with a request that she pay a second call to Broad Street. The clerk came back to say, “Her boy's at home with servants but she's gone to inspect Prosperity Hall.”

Edward sighed. “Bad timing. I suggested she look it over, and obtained the consent of the tax authorities. We'll wait for her return.”

Two days later a black youth carrying a pass signed by his owner, Lydia, delivered a letter.

The language gave him no room to demur. He discussed it with Joanna. She thought making the short trip would be all right, so long as he stayed the night at the inn Lydia mentioned. “In separate quarters, naturally,” she said as she hugged him.

Friday found him in his chaise on the Ashley River Road. Using a driving glove, he was able to handle the horse with one hand. The May air was heavy with dampness from recent rains. The sun fell through the pines and live oaks in shafts of pearly light. He passed the splendid avenue of trees leading to the plantation of the Main family, then a mile farther passed the inn. Three miles beyond he came to the lane leading to Prosperity Hall.

He hadn't seen Adrian's plantation since the war and remembered few details. Sad vistas of decay greeted him. Fallow fields thick with briers, volunteer palmettos, and tall weeds flanked the entrance road. Empty slave cabins showed broken walls and collapsed roofs. The main house rose up gray as an old tombstone, all the window glass on both floors broken out. One of its four piazza columns was missing except for a ragged stump. Directly above, the second-floor piazza sagged in a dangerous V.

Lydia's carriage was nowhere in sight. Her supposedly docile colored man lounged on the sagging stoop, amusing himself with a stick and a jackknife. He quickly hid the knife when he saw Edward coming. Lydia would send the man to the workhouse if she knew he was carrying an illegal weapon.

“How do, sir, my name Mountjoy,” the man said. “You be Mr. Bell?”

“That's right. She's expecting me, then?”

“Other side of the house.”

“The place looks terrible. Is it as bad inside?”

“Yes, sir. Everything wrecked. Two ceilings done fell in. Take a mighty lot of money to put it back right.”
But the acreage,
Edward thought—
in cotton the acreage will bring the money.

“Thank you, Mountjoy. Please watch my horse.”

As he walked to the side of the house, his shadow lay long on burnt and weedy grass. Much of it had died, leaving ugly scabs of sandy soil. An eerie stillness made every small sound noticeable.

“Lydia?” he called. Then he saw her, halfway down the sweep of ruined lawn leading to the river. The boat dock seemed in decent repair, but the banks around it were overgrown with reeds. The Ashley's ebb tide ran swiftly. The rain-swollen river resembled a gray-brown banner rippling in the wind.

“Here I am,” Lydia called unnecessarily, waving. They walked to one another. She wore the same English frock he'd seen before. She squeezed his good hand and bussed his cheek. “How grand and kind of you to come.”

“My duty and my pleasure,” he answered, aware of their isolation. Mountjoy would never dare spy on them. “Shall we look into these problems you mentioned? I suppose they have to do with the condition of the place. Let's go inside and inspect—”

“They're more easily seen from a distance.” She linked her right arm in his left; the press of her round breast wasn't accidental. “Stroll down to the dock with me, I'll show you from there.”

The steamy day was dying. Tiny gnats flitted in patches of golden light. The river's far bank was wild and greenly dense; nothing was built there. Edward had to admit that Adrian had been shrewd to buy such an attractive piece of real estate. The view of the Ashley was grand and uncluttered by any sight of human habitation.

Lydia led him onto the sturdy pier; someone had kept it
in repair. A stirring in the reeds to the left drew his attention. A fish or something larger, but hidden. He fanned himself with his tall round hat, now minus the French rosette. He raised it to shield his eyes as he inspected the tumbledown house.

“Is there one problem, or is everything the problem?”

She stepped in front of him, inches from his chest. “The problem's here, Edward. The problem is you and me.” Her eyes were blue as a cold January sky. Her breath caressed him like perfumed air.
Goddamn fool, she gulled you.
He'd almost suspected something like this but had dismissed it as an unfounded fear.

Her hand dropped and closed on his manhood. She squeezed gently, teasingly, but there was no teasing in her voice. “We belong together. You know that but you won't admit it to yourself.”

“Lydia, I hate deceit. You brought me here under false colors. You will excuse me if I don't prolong this interview.” He stepped back, pushing her hand away and cursing himself because he'd hardened.

She blocked his path to the lawn. She threw her arms around his neck, pressured him with her grinding belly as she kissed his face. “Oh, Edward, come to your senses. I love you. All I'm asking is a beautiful future for both of us. Leave your wife.”

“Leave—?” He couldn't continue.

“Yes, yes, dearest.” She kissed his chin, his throat, then his mouth, her wet tongue finding his. “We can have a fine life together. Think of our land, Prosperity Hall and Malvern, joined. You have the talent to manage it. That's why you became a lawyer, to know how to control land, you told me so before you sailed to England. But that's not the end, dearest. You can go to the legislature, I'll help you. Then you can control more than land, you can control people. You could go to Washington. Southern statesmen rule this country. They will for years.”

He interrupted her breathless daydream, broke her hold with his left hand. He'd dropped his hat. It rolled off the dock and sailed downriver on the fast current. His anger was nearly unmanageable.

“Lydia, it's over. It was over long ago. I love Joanna.”

“It can't be. She's common.”

“I'll hear no more. Stand out of my way. I don't want to be rude with you, but I will be if you continue this.”

“You hypocritical bastard. You want me, you know it. You want to fuck me day and night.”

“God, you're impossible.” He stepped left, to go around her. She countered it. She hit the black sling, setting off a raging pain in his arm.

“You can't stay married to that woman, that dockside nobody.”

He raised his fisted left hand. “Shut your foul mouth. Joanna's the best woman I've ever known or ever will.”

“And she's the last one.” Lydia smashed him in the chest with both hands. He pitched off the end of the dock.

He hit the silted water in panic. The strong current tugged his legs, pushed him away from the shore. He flung out his left hand. Kicking, gagging as water splashed in his mouth, he managed to seize the end of the dock.

“Lydia, for God's sake”—he sputtered, gasping for air—“call your man. Help me. I can't swim.”

She smiled sweetly. “I know that, dearest. I've known that for years.” She stamped on his left hand, then twice more. He lost his hold, fell backward with a faint cry.

He sank, bobbed up again. The current swept him past tall reeds and out toward the center of the river. Something in the reeds disturbed the water. Tiny round eyes broke the surface, then a long, wrinkled snout. “Oh, Christ. Lydia, help me.”

“Help yourself, you unfaithful whoreson,” she said, beating her fists on her hips and weeping. Edward's feeble attempt to swim was doomed. The alligator opened its jaws, snapped them shut on his left shoulder and torso, and whipped him underwater.

The alligator lashed him one way, then another. Edward surfaced twice, his throat filling, his body screaming with pain from the great jaws. Before the alligator bore him down the last time, he heard Lydia cry out in a perfect imitation of feminine distress.

“Oh, help. Mountjoy, help me. There's been a terrible accident.”

The bells of St. Michael's tolled for Edward's funeral. Three hundred people attended. Sally, Hamnet, ancient Pharaoh, and other slaves from the house and Bell's Bridge clustered in the segregated balcony, weeping more emotionally than the whites in the pews below. General Marion and his wife, Mary Esther, his first cousin, had come down from Pond Bluff, their home on the Santee. Marion was sixty now, a national hero. He hadn't married until his mid-fifties.

Joanna sat with Edgar. Across the aisle and one row back Lydia, heavily veiled, kept her restless pop-eyed son under control with a gloved hand. Edgar squirmed around to look at his cousin during the rector's praise of the deceased. The boys peered at each other with a vague distrust.

As the service ended, a storm broke: wailing wind and sheets of rain off the sea. If it hadn't been springtime, mourners might have thought it a hurricane. It made the burial in the little churchyard difficult. Only the immediate family was allowed inside the iron fence, but Sally huddled outside, her arm around her son, who was already an inch taller than his mother.

Though Edward's remains had never been found, a grave was dug for him beside that of his mother. Trying to lower the empty casket gently, the black sextons slipped and slid; one let go of his rope. The casket crashed the last two feet to its resting place. Joanna covered her eyes.

After the closing prayer Lydia approached. Her expression was impossible to read because of the veil. She attempted to touch Joanna, who stepped back.

Lydia said, “It was such a terrible accident, tripping and falling that way. I tried desperately to pull him out but the current was too swift. If I'd remembered he couldn't swim, I never would have encouraged a stroll to the dock. I blame myself for what happened. I am so sorry.”

Joanna's best impulse was to thank Lydia for her sentiments, which had previously been expressed in a flowery letter. Something in her sister-in-law's manner, an intonation, a glibness, struck her as wrong. It overcame her generosity and prompted a caustic reply.

“If only that would bring him back.”

Lydia recoiled, snatched up her son's hand, and marched from the graveyard.

The rain-soaked rector offered words of sympathy Joanna couldn't remember a moment later. There was enmity in Lydia's heart, Joanna believed that. Should she accept her sister-in-law's explanation of the accident? How could she not? To do otherwise was to court misery and suspicion for the rest of her life.

A woman lingered on the public footpath. The sodden state of her cloak and mobcap said she'd been there awhile. Small and coarse and painted with too much rouge, she stared at Joanna and Edgar.

Joanna had never seen her before. The scrutiny was unsettling. Joanna started to speak when the woman picked up her muddy skirts and scurried away up Meeting Street. Surely the attention wasn't accidental, though she had no explanation for it.

“Let's go home, Edgar. I'm cold.”

 

Mr. Whitney's ginning machine, patent applied for, revolutionized agriculture in South Carolina and the South. Short-staple cotton became a profitable crop, eagerly planted, processed, and shipped by yeoman farmers in the midlands. These were the same men who had railed against slavery as practiced by the aristocratic planters of the Low
Country. The new profitability of their crop changed their attitude and, across the state, created a singularity of opinion about the virtue of, the absolute necessity for, importation of more and more slaves. This in turn profoundly influenced the state's political thinking, and its future.

A year after Edward's funeral there occurred a melancholy foretaste of this future as it affected Charleston. From New York, Marburg imported a dozen copies of a small book,
A Graphick Account of Revolutionary Atrocities in the French Colony of Sante-Domingue, by One Who Witnessed Them. Tr. from the French of M. Georges Boucher.

He placed a dozen copies in his window and within a few days sold six. He was then called on by a trio of local planters. The spokesman said, “A friend lent me that Frenchman's book in the window. You don't appreciate the possible consequences of having such inflammatory material purveyed here. We respectfully request that you sell no more copies.”

“For what reason?” Marburg said affably.

“One might fall into the wrong hands.”

“Provoke behavior similar to that which it describes,” said a second man.

“Gentlemen, I don't believe books inspire acts of violence and barbarity. Certainly they don't among my patrons.”

The visitors exchanged sneering smiles. The spokesman said, “I refer to freedmen. A whole class of resentful niggers, many of whom can read. You may add to that a certain number of slaves who have been taught illegally. We dare not give them ideas when we as white people are outnumbered.”

Marburg's expression became pensive, even troubled. “What you ask would choke off a person's right to read whatever he chooses. I must respectfully decline your request.”

“Marburg, we insist. We demand you remove those books.”

“I still decline.” The bell over the door jingled. “Excuse me, gentlemen, I have a customer.” The callers left, all
glares and grumbles. Marburg heard one say, “Just another money-grubbing Jew,” before the door slammed.

Two nights later Marburg and Sarah were wakened by a ferocious crash from the shop. While Sarah calmed the frightened children, Marburg ran downstairs in his nightshirt, his old military sword in hand.

Broken glass lay in the window like a scattering of sapphires. Marburg saw immediately that every book on display had been pulled out, thrown in the gutter, and set afire. They smoldered in a heap, throwing off more smoke than flame.

He ran to the door, stormed into the street, shouted, “Cowards!” to the moonlit night. Only a mongrel's bark answered.

Sarah came to the door. Marburg said, “Go back inside, stay warm.” Shivering in his nightclothes, he waited for the watch to arrive as the books turned to ash.