Charleston (4 page)

The return of the British had changed his city. Soldiers, vagrants, blacks, bawds, and refugees from the country crowded the dirt streets and the footpaths on either side. Wagons and chaises and couriers on horseback added to the clamor and congestion. Families squatted on empty patches of land with barrows and bundles holding their few possessions. Edward guessed that Charleston's population of twelve or thirteen thousand might have doubled.

North of Boundary Street at Meeting, slaves with shovels and barrows were building a sizable hornwork from tabby, a kind of masonry made of lime mixed with oyster shells. The hornwork was the centerpiece of a line of fortifications running east and west toward the two rivers. He climbed a mound of dirt to observe more black men digging a broad ditch some distance in front of the earthworks and parallel to them. He approached a sweating engineer studying a diagram. “Sir, what's the purpose of the ditch?”

The annoyed man barked at him. “To save your life, sir. We expect Clinton to cross the Ashley and come at us from the Neck. The ditch will be dammed at each end, and tidal seepage will fill it. Behind it we'll have two abatis, another moat, and there”—he pointed downward—“a fraise.”

“I'm sorry, I don't know the term.”

“A fraise is a barricade of sharp stakes, pointing at the enemy. Obviously you're not an army man. You certainly look old enough.” He didn't mean it as a compliment.

Edward walked south again. The soldiers he saw were a
hard lot, armed with muskets and fowlers, tomahawks and knives. Blue uniform coats with white-edged buttonholes, the uniform of South Carolina regulars, were scarce. Most of the soldiers wore leggings and long hunting shirts dyed an assortment of bright colors. Whether the men were regulars or militia, Edward couldn't say.

He turned over to King Street a block west of Meeting and found more than one merchant hammering up boards to protect a shop. Packs of wild dogs fought for garbage strewn about. The only laughter came from youngsters romping as though no enemy threatened.

 

Mr. William Holliday's Queen Street taproom, a successor to Dillon's, was a favorite of the young gentry. Here, in the middle of the afternoon, Adrian Bell sat drinking and chatting with two friends.

Adrian resembled his younger brother and was nearly as tall. The strongest differences were large jug-handle ears and a pinched, off-putting face; Adrian's eyes were set too close together. What he lacked in good looks, he made up for with a prosperous appearance and a cultivated air of importance.

Adrian's friends were scions of wealthy plantation owners. The first, Storey Wragg, was a glutton with a face as red as an uncooked mutton chop and a stomach big enough for a woman about to deliver triplets. The other, Archibald Lescock, was a fop who perfumed his wig with cloves and cinnamon and padded his breeches to enhance the shape of his legs. All three young men were in fashion: long, narrow-tailed coats showing elaborate turnback cuffs, standing collars, stocks, fancy hose garters. Lescock's wig was expensive human hair. Adrian's was of less costly goat hair. The miserly Wragg settled for horse mane.

“I thought Gadsden was our resident radical madman, not Henry Laurens,” Wragg said between forkfuls from his trencher of pork loin. “I consider Laurens a man of moderation. I can't believe he endorsed the wish of General Lincoln and the Congress to put slaves under arms.”

“And free them afterward,” Adrian said. “But surely
they'd be poor soldiers. Then the battle would be lost, and we could return to being a Crown colony. Not entirely undesirable, in my estimation.”

“You think niggers wouldn't fight?” Wragg plucked at a piece of fat dangling from the corner of his mouth. “Don't forget Stono.” In 1739 slaves had massacred a dozen whites at Stono Bridge, twenty miles south of the city. Planters on horseback interrupted the slaves' dash to freedom in Florida, killed fourteen immediately, and shot others after questioning them. But some escaped, provoking a manhunt that lasted for weeks. More than forty suspects were rounded up and executed. The memory of this worst and bloodiest slave rebellion had terrified Charlestonians ever since.

“My wife can't forget Stono,” Lescock said in a hushed voice. “Her parents told her how awful it was to tremble in their beds every night, fearing they'd be murdered.”

Adrian mused aloud. “I wonder what Mr. Laurens would have us do if he takes away our chattels? Slosh around in the rice fields ourselves? Sweat to death in the heat?” The others laughed at the ridiculous idea.

At that moment Adrian saw his brother approaching. “My God. Am I looking at a ghost?”

Edward smiled. “No, I'm back. And not in our father's favor because of it.”

“I'm stunned. Stunned,” Adrian repeated as he rose and embraced his brother. “These are my friends.” He introduced Wragg and Lescock. Edward thought,
Corday's cousins
. Smooth, pale hands; an air of condescension as they in turn looked the new arrival up and down. Edward's clothes bore stains and patches unsuitable to a man of quality.

“You must tell me how this came about,” Adrian said. “Storey, Archibald—you'll excuse us?” They left, Adrian called for tankards of ale, and Edward briefly described his decision to break off his studies. When he mentioned Lydia Glass, he noticed a sudden nervousness in his brother's manner. Adrian asked, “Have you been home?”

“Not yet. Father told me you might be here, so I stopped.”

“You know mother's at Malvern?”

“Yes.”

“Edward, I've something to tell you. Duty compels it.”

“Fine, I'm listening.” With some of the rich dark ale in him he felt relaxed and happy.

“While you were away, I asked Lydia to marry me. She consented.”

Edward slammed the tankard down so hard that other patrons broke off conversations to stare.

Adrian flushed, leaned toward him, spoke in a pleading way. “Look here, it shouldn't be so hard to understand. I've always admired her. What man in Charleston doesn't? You were too busy to notice.”

“I don't believe this.”

“Why? You may be the romantic in the family, but I'm the steady one. I offer Lydia a better future. I will make a pile of money. I'm also on the right side. I believe the British will win the war.”

“Because you're an opportunist,” Edward snarled. “I've a right to knock your head off your shoulders, you damned—” He choked back the filthy name.

“Edward, she made the choice.”

“I want to hear it from her.”

“Yes, you should. She's in town, with her father. Please, Edward. Try not to be too angry.”

“What were you expecting, congratulations, or my hearty thanks for stealing Lydia behind my back?” He knocked over the tankard with a sweep of his hand; the contents slopped on the pegged floor. He stood abruptly, overturning his chair.

“Edward—”

“Go to hell, Adrian. You just go to hell.”

 

Edward wandered the streets and visited dramshops for most of the afternoon. Twice he almost turned his steps toward Lydia's house but decided he was too angry.

Sunset found him by the State House at the northwest corner of Broad and Meeting. In the crossway grateful citizens had erected a marble statue of William Pitt, honoring the great statesman's defense of the colonists when they
protested the Stamp Act. Edward gazed up at St. Michael's steeple and listened to the sweet notes of the eight bells announcing the hour.

The sky was pale as his hopes, the stars dim as his future.

 

The fine single house of the Bell family, stucco on brick, fronted the harbor at Oyster Point, sometimes called White Point. It overlooked a vista of marsh grass, the middens of bleached oyster shells, and the partially constructed fortifications he'd seen when he sailed in. In the hazy dusk the lanterns of Commodore Whipple's warships rode the gentle swells of the evening tide.

The three-story house was rectangular, the narrow end toward the street. A gate on the east side led into a walled garden dominated by a live oak taller than the house. A long piazza with the family entrance in the center faced the garden. Tom and Eliza had built the house at the end of the Seven Years' War, when Bell's Bridge shared Charleston's economic boom, and many merchants and planters “bragged in brick” to announce their newfound affluence.

Candlelight washed the windows of the front room on the ground floor that Tom used for a combination office and library. Edward went in through the garden and the piazza. Pharaoh, the aging black house man, greeted him and said his trunks had already been delivered. He found his father writing in a leather-covered book with a gilded clasp, one of his diaries. Tom Bell had filled several in Edward's lifetime. The room was warm and welcoming with its dark furniture and walls of bookshelves.

The books were there because of Eliza. Shortly after her wedding, Eliza Trott had taken over her young husband's education. Tom had learned only basics at the St. Philip's Free School, which was no longer favored by the gentry because it attracted too many poor children.

Eliza had directed Tom's reading; instilled in him a lifelong passion for learning. Tom supported the Charles Town Library Society and kept a private collection of over two hundred volumes, weighted heavily toward works on dissent. Locke and Rousseau were there, as
were
Cato's Speeches, The Independent Whig,
Davila's
History of the Civil Wars in France,
and several works on revolutions in the Roman republics. From these books had come Tom's conviction that the Crown was interfering with Englishmen's rights to self-government and full enjoyment of life, liberty, and property, said property including human beings.

“I saw Adrian,” Edward said without preamble. “He informed me of his wedding plans.”

Tom laid down his quill, more sympathetic than he'd been that afternoon. “Several times your mother suggested I write you. It wasn't my place. Adrian should have. Your brother often avoids the hard choices. I'm afraid he's a secret Tory.”

Edward slumped in a chair, stuck out his legs, picked a bit of dried dung off his boot. His eyes looked sunken, shadowed with strain. After a prolonged silence Tom said, “What will you do?”

“Speak to Lydia about it. Ask for an explanation.”

“She was never formally promised to you, Edward.”

He stamped the floor. “My own damn fault. I should have seen to it. I was too confident of her feelings.”

“What if she's determined to marry Adrian? What will you do then?”

“I don't know. Join the militia. Give myself up for cannon fodder. Doesn't make a hell of a lot of difference, does it?”

Tom sat silent, unable to find a useful answer.

Two days later, lookouts climbed to the steeple of St. Michael's to observe the British advance. Troops were
moving northward on the west shore of the Ashley. Edward wrote a note to Lydia, saying he would call in the afternoon on a matter of
utmost urgency
. He sent it to Tradd Street with Pharaoh's boy, another house slave, instructing him not to wait for a reply.

In Charleston the Glass family was older and more distinguished than the Bells, though it hadn't started that way. Lydia's great-grandfather had fled Barbados in 1698, under a cloud of cuckoldry and murder. Whether he was the seducer or the cuckold was never clear, but he'd killed a man.

South Carolina was a logical destination. For years Glass had imported Carolina pinewood to heat kettles that boiled the sugarcane on his plantation. Several wealthy Barbadians he knew had already emigrated to the colony to make a new start, and he followed them.

The Carolina Low Country had no sugarcane culture, but a culture of slavery was well established. Having sold his Barbadian holdings for capital, the new arrival financed traders who caught Indians in the highlands and marched them to the coast in coffles to be sold. It proved a lucrative business; Great-Grandfather Glass soon expanded into the importation of blacks from Africa.

Glass was one of the Goose Creek men, so called because they settled in that area north of the small city of some four thousand residents. The Goose Creek men were opportunistic and relatively lawless, buying and selling slaves and trading openly with the buccaneers who cruised the coast in the early years of the eighteenth century. Among their customers were Maj. Stede Bonnet, the famous “gentleman pirate,” and the mad Edward Teach, Blackbeard, who lit slow matches in his hair and beard to terrify his victims.

A faction loyal to the Lords Proprietors loathed the unsavory dealings of the Goose Creek men and constantly fought with them for control of the colonial legislature. As the pirates were caught and hanged, that trade declined. The town's merchants and lawyers assumed greater control in the Commons House of Assembly. The old Barbadians were by then moderately wealthy, and important.

Those advantages aside, the Glass family was a virtual case book of tragedy. Lydia's grandfather saw his wife and two daughters hauled away in dead carts, victims of Barbados fever.
2

²
Yellow fever

Lydia's father, Octavius Catullus Glass IV, had similar misfortunes. Although he traveled to Newport, Rhode Island, “the Carolina hospital,” to escape the pestilential summers, he lost two wives before a third lived long enough to bear three sons and a daughter. Only Lydia, born in 1759, survived to adulthood.

When she was ten, Lydia's aging father unwisely rode one of his fast-blooded horses in a Jockey Club race. Though a superb equestrian, that day he couldn't control his mount; he was thrown and paralyzed from the waist down. He retired to his house and never again left it. He saw only his daughter, his physician, his servants, and the lawyers who managed his affairs.

As expenses depleted his money and no more came in, he tried to maintain a position in the outside world by writing letters to the
South Carolina Gazette
. During the terrible smallpox epidemic of 1760, when Dr. Alexander Garden, a young Scot, successfully inoculated over three thousand residents, Glass wrote letters calling vaccination “interference with nature.” He wrote letters decrying Dr. Franklin's electrical experiments as “meddlesome tinkering in heaven by an atheist.” He wrote letters excoriating the merchants, mechanics, and a few enlightened planters who led the town's patriot faction. He called them “the herd,” and “low and ignorant hotheads and incendiaries.”

His letters on slavery were particularly wrathful. He considered “black treachery” a given and urged harsh treatment of slaves, warranted or not, to “deter the vile and criminous intentions of the inferior race.” He thought freedmen “a dangerous source of rebellious ideas.” Lydia grew up distrusting and fearing anyone with a dark skin.

Lydia lived in a fine three-story Georgian brick house on Tradd Street, a few steps west of Legare. Elias, the
stoop-shouldered slave who admitted Edward, carried a candle. The afternoon was gloomy and showery. The flickering light picked out a star-shaped scar on the slave's forehead. He'd been branded for attempting to run away; more of the elder Glass's “deterrence.”

Edward shook rain off his broad-brimmed hat and handed it to Elias, who said, “I tell Miss Lydia you be waiting, Mist' Edward.”

Edward paced the parlor, looking out to the wet garden. Soon he heard Lydia coming down, and not in a good mood. “Curse your nigger hide, Elias, hold the candle steady. Stop being so careless with fire or I'll send you to the workhouse and you won't stand up straight for a month.”

She swept in, blond hair tumbling over her shoulders. No ordinary or proper girl ever let her hair down in that risqué fashion, but Lydia reveled in not being orderly or proper. She was a beautiful, petite creature with delicate features and graceful hands. Small as she was, she'd somehow been blessed with disproportionately large breasts that rose full and ripe under her white sacque gown. Edward had seen those breasts several times when he'd bedded her.

“Darling,” she trilled, on tiptoe for his kiss on her cheek. She carried one of her collection of fashion babies, a twelve-inch porcelain doll outfitted in a detailed reproduction of a London gown several years out of date. No fashion babies had come into America since the war began, nor smart clothes of any kind.

“I was ever so surprised to learn that you'd left London.”

“I got word of the new British campaign. I felt I belonged here with my family. And you.”

She laid the fashion doll on one of the imitation Chippendale tables carved by Mr. Elfe of Broad Street, then settled herself and arranged her skirt. She seemed composed, though surely she knew what he wanted to discuss.

“Adrian told me about your plans,” Edward said. “You'll forgive me if I don't offer my good wishes. How could you do it, Lydia? You know I've never wanted anyone but you.”

“Wanting isn't loving, Edward.”

“Words. A lawyer's quibble.”

“No. If you'll only stop pacing like a tomcat, I'll explain.” He took a chair.

“I want to marry Adrian because I'll be secure with him. Marrying into the Bell family will be a useful alliance. I'll inherit money of my own, but there's less every day. Father doesn't care much for your father, but he knows Tom Bell is well off.”

Edward shook his head. “We had such marvelous times together. I always assumed we'd be married.”

With a little shrug she said, “Assumptions are dangerous. You never asked for my hand. Too little too late, isn't that the phrase?” When he turned red, she spoke less sharply. “Dear Edward. Let's not quarrel. You must hear me out.” She patted the cushion beside her.

As he sat down, he smelled the faintly scented warmth of her face and throat. When she cupped his right hand in both of hers, his body reacted strongly.

“Yes, I made a decision to marry your brother, but it's you that I love.”

“Then how in God's name—” She stopped his lips with her perfumed fingers.

“Let me finish. I've loved you forever, even in your wildest days—all the carousing and gambling, racing horses and consorting with sluts in Roper's Alley. I knew about ‘the dissolute Mr. Edward Bell.' So did half the town. I'm sure your behavior was one reason your father sent you to London. It's also why I decided you'd never settle down as a proper husband. But I don't want or need you as a proper husband. I want you as a lover.”

Astounded, he sat motionless as she continued. “I recall a letter in the
Gazette
some years ago. Not one of father's screeds, a letter with genuine wit. The writer said Charleston women make very agreeable companions but very expensive wives.” She brought her mouth close to his. “You can have the pleasure without the cost. After I marry Adrian, there's no reason you and I can't enjoy an arrangement.”

She kissed him with her moist lips and tongue, bringing his left hand up to her right breast, large and soft above the rigid stays under her clothes. She tickled his ear with her index finger.

“You would like that, wouldn't you?”

He jumped up, red faced. “You're asking me to cuckold Adrian? By God, I may be a lowlife in everyone's estimation, but I'm not that low.”

“Oh, you're being silly. Prudish.”

“He's my
brother,
for Christ's sake.” Lydia shot a worried look upward, as though the crippled man hiding in his gloomy lair might hear. “What you suggest is preposterous and wrong.”

Her underskirts rustled as she rose. Her own anger seemed to give her height, rob her of softness. “You're refusing me?”

“I would refuse any woman who proposed such a thing.”

She rushed at him, little fists battering his shoulders. “I'm not any woman. I'm not.” On her toes, she ground her mouth on his, her tongue licking and probing. He felt her hair against his cheek. A kind of delirium briefly weakened his resolve. “I'm not,” she repeated in a whisper.

He drew back. “We should end this conversation.” In the foyer he called for his hat. Behind him Lydia spoke.

“You'd better not walk out.”

He turned back, looked her in the eye. “That's exactly what I intend. I know you're accustomed to getting whatever you want, but this time you'll have to accept failure.”

Tears rushed into her eyes. “You don't mean it.”

“I do, absolutely.”

“You bastard.” She snatched up her fashion doll and hurled it. He ducked; the doll broke the window. The porcelain head shattered, pieces falling into the palmettos below. He'd seen this destructive streak in Lydia before.

She ran past him, shoving him aside. She darted down the passage leading to the pantry, bumping into Elias, who had his hat. “Elias, Goddamn you, there's broken glass in the parlor and the garden, clean it up.”

She didn't look back. Edward took his hat and let himself out. He wanted to tell Adrian of her perfidy but he didn't dislike his brother enough to do that, ever.

 

Workmen on scaffolds painted St. Michael's steeple black, presuming that would make it a more difficult target for artillery. The British squadron sat off the bar, waiting. Hoping to obstruct their passage, Commodore Whipple sank his ships in the Cooper River across from the Exchange, behind a boom of logs and chains.

Governor John Rutledge was given the virtual authority of a military dictator. Christopher Gadsden, the newly appointed lieutenant governor, told Tom Bell that Carolina militia would not come to Charleston's aid because the British were spreading rumors of a smallpox epidemic.

On March 29 the first British units crossed the Ashley River in shallow-draft boats. They landed at Bee's Ferry and marched down the Neck. Three days later, April 1, they broke ground for a siege line half a mile in front of the Charleston works. The noose was in place around the victim's neck.