Chesapeake (102 page)

‘We’re about to manumit her,’ Paul said, and with slow, patient force Susan walked to the desk.

‘But we’ve already sold her! Paul, this girl is a troublemaker.’

‘I know she is not,’ Paul said quietly

And then Herbert lost his control. ‘Better than anyone you know her—and you should damned well be ashamed of yourself.’

‘I am,’ Paul said. ‘I have been for fourteen years.’ Susan took his hand and said, ‘And now we shall sign the paper. Uncle Herbert, since you were technically in charge of Devon when this document was drawn up three days ago, I should think it wise to have you witness it.’

And she asked Eden to wheel the chair closer, and she sat down, obviously fatigued, took the pen and signed away their property rights in the slave girl. Paul dipped the quill in the ink and signed. Then he motioned to Uncle Herbert, who huffed and hawed until Paul said quite sharply, ‘We want your signature, Herbert. Your last official act on Devon.’ And when the gray-faced man reluctantly signed, Paul said, ‘You look very tired. I should have relieved you of this tedious burden three years ago.’

Mr. Starch, who was outraged by everything that had happened, could be silent no longer. ‘To behave like this in front of two slaves … By God, sir, it’s indecent.’ And he stomped from the room.

‘He’s right,’ Herbert said, looking with disgust at Eden and Cudjo. Then, turning his back on them, he stood facing Paul and Susan. ‘I did my best to save your plantation.’

‘You were needed,’ Paul said. ‘But now Devon requires a new kind of leadership.’

‘And you think you’re prepared to provide it?’

‘I do. With Susan’s help.’

Scornfully, Herbert turned to her. ‘He certainly gave you good leadership, didn’t he? Headfirst down the roof.’

‘The years pass,’ Susan said quietly. ‘Passion is spent and wisdom prevails. We’re going to make Devon even a greater plantation.’

‘Not with him at the head,’ Herbert snapped, and with disgust at the weaknesses of his family, he stomped from the room.

After he slammed the door, there was an awkward silence. Paul knew that he should never have spoken thus to a white man in the presence of slaves, but it had been done, and Eden, understanding his thoughts, began tidying the room, as if this had been an ordinary day. ‘Cudjo, neaten them books.’ And as the two slaves moved about, Paul said, ‘Tomorrow our work begins.’

And Eden said, ‘Tomorrow could we be takin’ my paper an’ carryin’ it to the courthouse? An’ it be wrote in the book?’

‘Oh yes!’ Mrs. Steed cried. ‘I’ll sail with you.’ When her husband looked up in surprise, she said, ‘I feel so much better, Paul. And I want to see these people married. I insist that Eden start her new life correctly.’

Paul nodded, and when Eden glanced at him she saw that in his eyes there was that same enigmatic look she had seen the night previous,
when he had so frightened her. And she realized that it could never be deciphered: he had beat her, and loved her, and set her free.

She would not thank him for his generosity. Arranging the final pillow, she stalked from the room, but Cudjo went to each of his benefactors, bowing his great torso and saying, ‘We thanks you.’

They slept at the forge that night, bewildered, torn apart by a confusion of emotions they barely understood. Toward dawn Cudjo asked, ‘Afore we sails to Patamoke, mebbe I goes to cubboard. Git shed o’ the pistol an’ knives.’

But Eden had a different vision: ‘Never. Some day we gonna need ’em.’

IT WAS A TRIP THAT BARTLEY PAXMORE WOULD
remember for the rest of his life. By 1837 roads of a rough, inadequate nature linked together the small towns scattered across the Eastern Shore; it was now possible, though hardly comfortable, to drive a wagon from Patamoke to the county seat at Easton.

But those isolated homes that stood at the remote ends of peninsulas were still accessible mainly by boat. Of course, rude trails led up the middle of each peninsula, but it was difficult for a horse to negotiate them. From the Paxmore house at Peace Cliff to Patamoke was an easy seven-mile sail; using tortuous land trails, the distance was a rugged thirteen miles.

So when young Paxmore, eighteen years old and self-reliant, decided to leave Peace Cliff to visit a settlement at the headwaters of the Miles River, he naturally elected to go by the small sloop-rigged boat his family owned. He told no one of his plans or his departure. He simply went down to the dock at dawn one Thursday morning and set forth.

It was not until dinner—that is, the midday meal—that he was missed. Younger children were sent running to the dock, and they returned with the expected news.
‘Emerald’s
gone!’ they shouted, and when the meal resumed they asked many questions as to where Bartley might have taken it. His gray-haired parents stared straight ahead, refusing comment, but toward the end of dinner George Paxmore could contain himself no longer. Slapping his big right hand on the table so that the dishes jumped, he cried, ‘I will be danged!’ and hurriedly left the table lest he explode with laughter.

Elizabeth Paxmore tried to quieten the children, who burst forth with a dozen questions. Amy, the youngest girl, was of the opinion that he
had gone to Oxford to buy hogs, at which suggestion her mother smiled. But she would not tell the children where, in her opinion, their brother had gone.

He was, at that moment, breasting Blackwalnut Point at the southern tip of Tilghman Island, setting his jib and mainsail for the long run to the north. He lolled in the rear of the boat, tiller tucked under his left arm, the lines to the sails lashed close to his right hand. The wind was coming so briskly off the port quarter that he was able to keep the
Emerald
well on course. And there he sat through the long afternoon.

From Peace Cliff to the head of Miles River was a distance of forty-seven miles, and he would not be able to cover this before nightfall, because the course, like all on the Eastern Shore, required many different headings, and for a considerable distance he would sail due south in order to make north. What might happen to his wind in that stretch, no one could predict, but it would certainly be a combination of reach-and-beat for the last twenty miles.

He was not concerned about the necessity of spending the night in his boat. He would merely move inshore, tie the bow to some projecting tree and catch what sleep he could. He was not hungry now, nor would he be at sunset, for his mind was so agitated that to think of food would have been repugnant.

He had seen Rachel Starbuck only once, at the Yearly Meeting of Quakers held in the revered old meeting house called Third Haven in Easton. The Paxmore clan had not tried to reach the meeting by cart; they had piled into the sloop, left the Choptank at Oxford and made their way up the glorious Third Haven Creek and into Papermill Pond, where they tied up to the dock belonging to Mordecai Swain. They walked to the meeting house and as they entered, Bartley groaned. The perplexed Quakers were still debating the problems of slavery, for the outlying meetings were well behind Patamoke in grappling with them, and families like the Paxmores had to be patient while the others caught up. But Bartley was astonished to hear Swain arguing from the front bench that Quakers must do nothing to alienate the great plantation owners who still held slaves in bondage:

In uttering the phrase
property rights
Swain had unthinkingly adopted the vocabulary of those who defended slavery—‘This slave is my lawful
property and you cannot deprive me of his labor’—and the meeting rebuked him. Three different speakers chided him for falling into error, after which he rose again, speaking in a soft, conciliatory voice:

Before Swain could retake his seat a man Bartley had never seen before leaped to his feet with un-Quaker force and launched into a vigorous plea that the meeting commit itself to a course exactly opposite to what Mordecai had proposed. He proposed that Quakers urge slaves to run away from their masters and then assist them in fleeing to freedom in Pennsylvania. Bartley could feel a stir of excitement sweep Third Haven as the man spoke, and he whispered to his father, ‘Who is he?’

‘Very strong-minded man from Miles River. Name of Starbuck.’

And then, as Bartley looked more closely at the impassioned speaker, he saw, sitting in the row opposite, in the women’s section, a young girl of exceeding beauty. She had wide, dark eyes and light-brown hair, and was wearing a gray dress with a white collar and a blue-and-yellow bonnet. She and her mother were gazing so steadily and with such pride at the speaker that Bartley guessed they were his family; he could not take his eyes away from the Starbuck girl.

She was younger than he, he supposed, but her face showed unusual maturity and great firmness of character. As she listened to her father speak she leaned forward as if to urge him on, but Bartley saw that her mother, almost as pretty as she, placed a restraining hand on her elbow, pulling her back into a more ladylike posture.

He heard no more of the debate. No matter, he thought. It would continue in dull repetition for the next twenty years. He could see only the Starbuck girl, and if he listened intently he fancied that he could hear her breathing. She was the most compelling human being he had ever seen, and he was dizzy from watching her.

At the noon break he surprised himself by walking boldly up to her and asking, ‘Is thee Speaker Starbuck’s girl?’

‘I am.’

‘I’m Bartley Paxmore. From Patamoke Meeting.’

‘I know,’ she said, and the fact that this incandescent girl had taken the trouble to find out who he was quite immobilized him. He stood there
in the sunlight, on the meeting-house steps, and could think of nothing to say.

‘Would thee like to take lunch with us?’ she asked, and when he fumbled for some kind of answer which would indicate that he had no packed lunch of his own, she said quietly, ‘We always bring more than enough,’ so he joined them.

It was a feast. The Starbucks had five children, two of them married, and after introductions had been made Bartley had to say, in acute embarrassment, ‘No one told me thy name.’

‘Rachel,’ she said.

It was of Rachel he now thought on his long run to the north. From that day three months ago she had filled his mind; indeed, he could think of nothing else but her superb figure in the gray dress, moving among the trees at Third Haven, her pretty face tucked in under the blue-and-yellow bonnet. Memory of her captivated him, and he could see her in the waves as they sped by his boat; he could feel the pull of her smile in the lines leading to the sails. He had never before heard a name so totally appropriate, so euphonious as Rachel Starbuck.

He spent that summer’s night moored to a fallen tree on the shore opposite St. Michaels, and since he could not sleep, he watched the vagrant lights of the little fishing village, the comings and goings of men with lanterns, and he thought: Soon I shall have a home of my own, and I shall go to the barn at night to fetch the eggs for Rachel. And the image was so felicitous that he broke into song:

He chuckled: Father would berate me if he heard me singing such military words. And then the moving lights across the broad river began to vanish, and all were asleep except him, and his heart beat like a hundred hammers, because ere this new day ended he would be docking his boat at the home of Rachel Starbuck.

He reached the farm at eleven in the morning, and the two younger Starbucks spotted him as soon as he pulled his boat toward shore. ‘It’s Paxmore!’ they shouted, and their cries brought their sister to the door, and when she saw who had come, she knew at once what his mission was. Without pressing down her apron, or in any way prettifying herself, she walked down the path to meet him, holding out her hand to bid him welcome.

He was faint with emotion and could scarcely voice his words. ‘Is thy father home?’ he asked abruptly.

‘He is,’ she said.

Without saying another word, Bartley Paxmore strode to the farmhouse, entered and sought out Micah Starbuck. In the Quaker tradition, he addressed the older man by his first name. ‘Micah, I have come to ask for thy daughter.’

The abolitionist put his fingers together and drew his mouth in as if to whistle. ‘Well,’ he said to Paxmore’s surprise, ‘she’s got to go sometime. What does thee say, Chick?’

Rachel reached out and took Bartley’s hand. ‘I think I’m ready.’

‘We’ll give notice to the meeting on Sunday,’ Starbuck said, and it was as simple as that. When Prudence Starbuck came down from work she had been doing upstairs, she was informed of her daughter’s engagement. ‘We’ve heard thee’s a fine young man, Bartley,’ she said.

‘Thank thee, Prudence,’ he replied. Things that he had dreamed of with such ardor were happening so fast, he became quite dizzy and did not know what to do next.

‘And now thee may kiss her,’ Micah said, and Bartley trembled and leaned forward awkwardly and kissed Rachel on the cheek.