Love and War nas-2 Page 11

  Hazy sunshine splashed the office windows. The air smelled of violets and the perfume of the sweet olive, which he could always bring to mind no matter how far from Mont Royal he traveled. Wishing he didn't have to wade through the document in hand, he watched an inch-long palmetto bug scurry along a light-burnished sill near his desk, bound from dark to dark. As are we all.

  He shook his head, irritated with himself. But the mood refused to pass. Melancholy times brought melancholy feelings.

  Conversation, occasional laughter or singing reached him from the nearby kitchen building. He comprehended none of what he heard. His thoughts had turned from the papers to the commission that had been offered to him — staff duty in the Richmond office of Bob Lee, the veteran officer whose loyalty to his native Virginia had forced him to leave the federal army. Lee was presently the special military adviser to Jefferson Davis.

  The prospect of desk duty didn't thrill Orry, though he supposed it was unrealistic to expect a field command. Not entirely so, however; not if Richmond was inclined to follow the example of the enemy. An officer Orry had heard about but never met in Mexico, Phil Kearny, had also lost his left arm there — and he was now a brigadier commanding Union volunteers.

  Though his sense of duty was strong, he hesitated to accept the commission for a number of other reasons. Davis was said to be difficult. A brave soldier — a West Point man — he was notorious for wanting to lead troops and, in lieu of that, for maintaining tight control of those who did.

  Further, Orry's sister Ashton and her husband, James Huntoon, were in Richmond, where Huntoon held some government job. When Orry had discovered the malicious part Ashton played in the near-murder of Billy Hazard, he had ordered her and her husband to leave Mont Royal and never return. The thought of being anywhere near them repelled him.

  Next, he had no overseer. Younger men he might have hired had all rushed off to serve. An older one with brains and enough physical strength for the job couldn't be found. He had advertised in the Charleston and Columbia papers and heard from three applicants, all unacceptable.

  Most important, his mother was in poor health. And he hated to leave Madeline. That was not merely selfishness. If he were gone, Justin might try to strike at her for the damage she had done to his face and his reputation.

  The slaves might pose a threat as well. He hadn't discussed it with Madeline — he didn't want to alarm her unnecessarily — but he had begun to detect subtle changes in the demeanor and behavior of some of the bucks. In the past, harsh discipline had seldom been necessary at Mont Royal and never condoned, except once — a cat-hauling ordered by his late father. In the current situation, Cousin Charles's boyhood friend Cuffey was the most notable offender; he bore watching.

  Reluctantly, Orry redirected his attention to the thick, blue-backed document ornamented with seals impressed in wax. If he signed, he would be agreeing to surrender a substantial portion of his rice profits for the year in exchange for government bonds of equal value. This so-called produce loan had been conceived to help finance the war for which Orry, like his friend George, had scant enthusiasm. Orry understood the futility of the South's military adventure because he understood some simple figures first called to his attention, dourly, by his brother Cooper.

  About twenty-two millions lived in the North. There, too, you found most of the old Union's industrial plants, rail trackage, telegraphic lines, mineral and monetary wealth. The eleven states of the Confederacy had a population of something like nine million; a third of those, slaves, would never be of use to the war effort except in menial ways.

  Dubious, not to say dangerous, attitudes about the war prevailed these days. Fools like the LaMotte brothers snickered at the suggestion that the South could be invaded — or, if it were, that the result could be anything but glorious Confederate victory. From aristocrats to yeomen, most Southerners had a proud belief in their own abilities, which led to an unrealistic conviction that one good man from Dixie could whip ten Yankee shopkeepers anywhere, anytime, world without end, Amen.

  In very rare moments of chauvinism, Orry shared some of those beliefs. He would match his younger cousin Charles against any other officer. He saw the same courage in Charles's commander, Wade Hampton. And he found truth — though not the whole of it — in the maxim he had memorized in his young, hopeful years. In war, Bonaparte said, men are nothing; a man is everything.

  Even so, to imagine the North had no soldiers to equal those from the South was idiocy. Suicidal. Orry could recall any number of first-rate Yankees from the Academy, including one he had known personally and liked very much. Where was Sam Grant serving now?

  No answer to that — and no way to tell which way this strange, unwanted war might go. He forced himself back to the occasionally baffling legalisms of the bond agreement. The sooner he finished work for the day, the sooner he'd see Madeline.

  About four, Orry returned from surveying the fields. He wore boots, breeches, and a loose white shirt whose empty left sleeve was held up at the shoulder by a bright pin. At thirty-five, Orry was as slender as he had been at fifteen and carried himself with confidence and grace despite his handicap. His eyes and hair were brown, his face rather long. Madeline said he grew handsomer as he aged, but he doubted that.

  He had signed the bond agreement. Having done so, he stopped worrying about repayment. A decision prompted by patriotism oughtn't to have any conditions on it.

  He crossed the head of the half-mile lane leading down to the river road. Mossy live oaks hid it from the light most of the day. He walked around the corner of the great house, which faced a formal garden and the pier on the slow-moving Ashley. Light footfalls sounded on the piazza overhead but stopped as he moved out from beneath it. Above him he saw a small, plump woman in her late sixties gazing contentedly at the cloudless sky.

  "Good afternoon, Mother."

  In response to his call, Clarissa Gault Main glanced down and smiled in a polite, puzzled way. "Good afternoon. How are you?"

  "Just fine. You?"

  The smile broadened, benign. "Oh, splendid — thank you so much." She turned and drifted inside. He shook his head. He had identified himself as her son, but the prompt was wasted; she no longer knew him. Fortunately, the Mont Royal blacks, with one or two exceptions, loved Clarissa. She was unobtrusively supervised and protected by everyone with whom she came in contact.

  Where was Madeline? In the garden? As he studied it, he heard her inside. He found her in the parlor examining a cylindrical package nearly five feet long and heavily wrapped. She ran to put her arms around him.

  "Careful," he said and laughed. "I'm dusty and sweaty as a mule."

  "Sweaty, dusty — I love you in any condition." She planted a long, sweet kiss on his dry mouth. Refreshing as water from a mountain well. She locked her hands behind his neck while they embraced, and he felt the lushness of her full figure against him. Though legal marriage was as yet denied them, they shared the easy physical intimacy of a couple wed a long time and still in love. They slept without night clothes — Madeline's kind and forthright nature had quickly rid him of sensitivity about the appearance of his stump.

  She drew back. "How has the day been?"

  "Good. War or no war, these past weeks have been the happiest I've ever known."

  She sighed a murmurous agreement, twining her fingers in his as they stood with foreheads touching. Madeline was a full-bosomed woman with lustrous dark eyes and hair and a richly contrasting pale complexion. "Justin has the means to make me a tiny bit happier, I confess."

  "I'm sure we'll overcome that obstacle." The truth was, he wasn't sure, but he never admitted it. Over her shoulder he studied the parcel. "What's that?"

  "I don't know. It's addressed to you. It came up from the dock an hour ago."

  "That's right, the river sloop was due today —"

  "Captain Asnip sent a note with the package. He said it arrived on the last vessel into Charleston before the blockade began. I did notice it ca
rries the name of a transshipping firm in Nassau. Do you know what's in it?"

  "I might."

  "You ordered it, then. Let's unwrap it."

  Unexpected panic banished his smile. What if the sight of the contents upset her? He tucked the package under his right arm.

  "Later. I'll show you while we have supper. I want to display it properly."

  "Mystery, mystery." She laughed as he strode away upstairs.

  For the evening, he replaced his bedraggled outfit with a similar but clean one. His dark hair, over which he had poured two pitchers of water before he toweled it, had a soft, loose look. It was dusk as they sat down to dine. Blurry candles, upside-down images of the real ones, glowed in the highly buffed plane of the table. A small black boy amiably stirred the air and whisked flies off with an ostrich fan. Clarissa had eaten in her room, as she usually did, and retired.

  "This smells grand," Orry said, touching a fork to the golden crust of the delicacy cooked in half of a big oyster shell. "Blue crab?"

  "Netted in the Atlantic yesterday. I ordered two barrels in ice. They came on the packet boat. So much for gastronomy, Mr. Main. I want to see the package." It lay on the floor near him, the outer wrapping gone; oiled cloth was visible.

  Studiously digging into the freshly picked and baked crab, he teased her with his straight face and low-voiced "Delicious."

  "Orry Main, you're intolerable! Will you show me if I tell you some news about Justin?"

  Sober suddenly, he laid his fork aside. "Good news?"

  "Oh, nothing concerning the divorce, I'm afraid. Just something funny and a little sad." She relayed what she'd heard from one of the kitchen girls who had done an errand to Resolute earlier that day.

  "In the rear," Orry mused. "A direct hit on the seat of the LaMotte family's prestige, eh?"

  She laughed. "Your turn now." He broke two red wax seals and unwrapped the package. When she saw what the oiled cloth contained, she gasped.

  "It's beautiful. Where is it from?"

  "Germany. I ordered it for Charles and hoped it would get through."

  He handed her the scabbarded weapon. With great care, she grasped the leather grip wound with brass wire. She drew out the curved blade; the fan boy's eyes grew round as he watched the candlelight reflect on the filligreed steel. Orry explained that it was a light cavalry saber, the approved 1856 design: forty-one inches overall.

  Madeline tilted the blade to read the engraved inscription on the obverse: To Charles Main, beloved of his family, 1861. She gave him a long, affectionate look, then examined the other side. "I can't read this. Is it Cluberg?"

  "Clauberg of Solingen. The maker. One of the finest in Europe."

  "There are many tiny engraved flowers and curves — even medallions with the letters C. S. in them."

  "On certain versions of this model, the letters are U.S.," he said with a dry smile.

  Still treating the sword as if it were glass, she returned it to the gilt-banded scabbard of blue iron. Then, avoiding his eyes, she said, "Perhaps you should have ordered one for yourself."

  "In case I accept the commission?"

  "Yes."

  "Oh, but that's a cavalry sword. I couldn't wear it even if I decided to —"

  "Orry," she interrupted, "you're evading. You're evading me and evading a decision."

  "I plead guilty to the latter," he admitted with an expression swift to come and go but revealing all the same. He was hiding something from her — behavior not typical of him. "I can't go to Richmond yet. There are too many things standing in the way. Foremost is your situation here."

  "I can look after myself splendidly — as you well know."

  "Now don't get tart with me. Of course I know it. But there's also Mother to consider."

  "I can look after her, too."

  "Well, you can't run this plantation without an overseer. The Mercury printed my advertisement again. Did the packet boat bring any replies?"

  "I'm afraid not."

  "Then I must keep searching. I've got to raise a good crop this year if I'm to contribute anything to the government — which I agreed to do by signing those papers today. I won't even think of Richmond till I find the right man to take over."

  Later they went to the library. From the shelves Tillet Main had furnished with works of quality, they chose a finely bound Paradise Lost. During the years when they had met in secret, they had frequently read poetry aloud; the verse rhythms sometimes became a poor substitute for those of love-making. Living together, they discovered such reading still brought pleasure.

  They took places on a settee Orry had moved in just for this purpose. He was always on Madeline's left so that he could hold that side of the book. A dim corner of the room contained the stand on which he had hung one of his army uniforms after he came home from Mexico. The coat had both sleeves intact. Orry seldom glanced at the coat any longer, for which she was thankful.

  He leafed through the poem's first book until he found a bit of paper between pages. "Here's the place." He cleared his throat and began in the middle of line 594:

  ". . . As when the sun new ris'n

  Looks through the horizontal misty air

  Shorn of his beams ..."

  Madeline took it up, her voice murmurous in the near-dark:

  ". . . or from behind the moon

  In dim eclipse disastrous twilight sheds

  On half the nations, and with fear of change

  Perplexes monarchs."

  "Lesser folk, too," he said. She laid the book in her lap as he continued, "Cooper claims we got into this war because the South refused to accept the changes taking place in the country. I remember in particular his saying that we couldn't deal with either the necessity for change or its inevitability." He patted the book. "It seems John Milton understood."

  "Will the war really change anything, though? When it's over, won't things be pretty much as they were?" "Some of our leaders would like to believe so. I don't." But he didn't want to spoil the evening with melancholy speculation; he kissed her cheek and suggested they continue reading. She surprised him by taking his face between her cool palms and gazing at him with eyes that shone with happy tears. "Nothing will change this. I love you beyond life itself." Her mouth pressed his, opening slightly; the kiss was long and full of sweet sharing. He brought his hand up and tangled it in her hair. She leaned on his shoulder, whispering, "I've lost interest in British poets. Blow out the lights and let's go upstairs."

  Next day, while Orry was in the fields, Madeline went hunting for a shawl she needed to mend. She and Orry shared a large walk-in wardrobe adjoining his bedroom; she searched for the shawl there.

  Behind a row of hanging frock coats he never wore she spied a familiar package. She had last seen the presentation saber downstairs in the library. Why on earth had he brought it up here and hidden —?

  She caught her breath, then reached behind the coats and lifted the package out. Its red wax seals were unbroken. No wonder he hadn't been amused when she teased him about a second sword.

  She replaced the package and carefully shifted the coats in front of it again. She would keep her discovery to herself and let him speak to her in his own good time. But there was no longer any doubt about his intentions.

  And with fear of change perplexes monarchs. Remembering the line, she stood near the room's single oval window, rubbing her forearms as if to warm them.

  18

  A sinking sun bled red light through the office windows next evening. Orry sweated at the desk, tired but needing to finish the purchase list for his factor in Charleston. He had been forced to move his business back to the Eraser company, which had served his father, because Cooper had transferred the assets of the family shipping firm to the Navy Department. Cooper held all the CSC stock, and so had a perfect right to do it. But it was damn inconvenient, requiring another adjustment on Orry's part.

  There would be more to come, if he could judge from the last letter from Fraser's. It had been
stamped with a crude wood-block indicia reading PAID 5¢. It was a splendid example of the annoying little matters of nationhood left over once the shouting stopped. The regular federal service had gone on handling Southern mail right through June first. But now a new Confederate postmaster was scrambling to create an organization and, presumably, print stamps. Till some showed up, states and municipalities produced their own.

  Fraser's had owed him a refund from a past transaction. They had sent partial payment in the form of new Confederate bills, all very pretty and bucolic with their engravings of a goddess of agriculture and cheerful Negroes working a cotton field. The bills bore a line of tiny type reading Southern Bank Note Co. The letter from Fraser's commented, "The bills are printed in N.Y. — don't ask us how." A clever man could have deduced it from the one-thousand-dollar note enclosed. It carried portraits of John Calhoun and Andrew Jackson. Obviously the damnfool Yankees who designed the bill hadn't read history or heard of nullification.

  Cities were printing paper money, too. Orry's representative at Fraser's had enclosed a sample — a bizarre Corporation of Richmond bill bearing a heroic portrait of the governor on pink paper in the denomination of fifty cents. Few secessionists had bothered their addled heads about practical consequences of the deed.

  "Orry — oh, Orry — such news!"

  Madeline burst into the office, picked up her crinoline-stiffened skirt, and did a wholly uncharacteristic dance around the room while he recovered from his surprise. She was giggling — giggling — while she jigged. Tears ran down her face and caught the dark red light.

  "I shouldn't be happy — God will strike me dead — but I am. I am!"

  "Madeline, what —?"

  "Maybe He'll forgive me this once." She pressed an index finger beneath her nose but still couldn't stop giggling. More tears flowed. "I'll — ask Him — if I ever — get over this —"

  "Have you lost your senses?"

  "Yes!" She seized his hand, pulled him up, waltzed him around. "He's dead!"