Chesapeake (44 page)

Steed ran to the railing and tried to throw the gasping old man a line, but it fell far short. The distance lengthened and the old man’s arms grew feeble. When he realized that no turn could be made, no boat lowered,
he began to laugh, and the last thing those on deck heard was his high, insane cackle as the wake pulled him under.

It was difficult for Ruth Brinton Paxmore to get the expedition into focus. When she sat with the Steeds before the pewter cupboard and listened to the celebrating, she simply could not understand how a voyage could be considered a success when it had ended in total failure, but Captain Steed was obviously pleased, her husband was euphoric, and even the Turlock boys seemed satisfied. It was mysterious.

‘Thee still insists the expedition was a success?’ she asked primly.

‘We do,’ Captain Steed said, gratified at the profit from his salt.

‘But thee didn’t get thy slaves back?’

‘No, they were sold in Haiti.’

‘And Turlock didn’t get his wife back?’

‘No, she was traded in Jamaica.’

‘And Edward didn’t get his ship back?’

‘No, it was burned at Marigot.’

‘And the Turlock boys didn’t even get their father back?’

‘No, he drowned in the Chesapeake.’

‘And thee calls that success?’

She looked at the participants: Steed was placid and benign with his profits; the squirrel hunter basked in the glory of having killed Griscom and two others with only three shots; the twins were content with some mysterious inner gratification; and the eyes of her own husband were afire with victory. It passed belief, and she concluded that there was something in the world of men that enabled them to define
victory
in terms that no woman would ever understand. She thought she had better say no more.

But that night, when she was safely home at Peace Cliff with her husband, she was awakened by the terrible reality of the crime she had committed. In her righteousness she had driven Edward’s slaves from the security and justice of her home; they had been passed along to Steed for money, and from Devon they had joyfully fled with the pirates, seeking freedom. In Haiti they had been sold back into the world’s cruelest enslavement. There, in the most awful jungles of America, they would toil under the lash, and remember their childhoods in Africa, and their decent days with the Paxmores, and within a year they would be dead.

‘Oh God, forgive us our sins!’ she mumbled as the quivering began. She saw Mary straining in the Haitian fields, that good woman and her family perishing from exhaustion. ‘You should be here with me,’ she whimpered; even in slavery it would be better to work for people one could love, awaiting the day when wrongs were righted. ‘Your death is charged against my soul,’ she whispered.

Obdie would die in Haiti, and Abiram and Dibo, and Sara, too. ‘Oh,
Sara!’ she cried in the night. ‘We need you.’ Her death was lamentable, for she had learned to fight back. In her stubborn way she had conducted a secret life which no white would ever penetrate; she had been difficult and at times even ugly, but on this hideous night Ruth Brinton acknowledged that if she were a slave, she would behave like Sara. ‘I would never stop fighting,’ she said.

Her restlessness caused Edward to turn in his sleep, and desperately she wanted to talk with him, but she knew that on this night of reunion it would be unfair to throw her guilt on him, so she tiptoed away, wrapped herself in a coat and moved through the silent rooms in which black women had once talked with her. She went to where her own children lay, but when she looked down on them she could see only the black infants she had sent to their death: the children of Mary and Obdie. And she left the room of sleepers.

In the kitchen she opened her accounts book to the page on which she had entered the wages owing them; slowly the sums had grown against the day of freedom. The debts had not been paid and could never be.

In desolation of spirit she went onto the porch, seeking consolation from the river; but on this night the Choptank offered none. A considerable wind had begun to sweep in from the bay, agitating the river and throwing whitecaps. A dying moon hung in the east, casting gray light upon the marshes where geese huddled and on the tips of tall trees waiting to become ships. She looked west toward Devon, but it was hidden in the spray thrown by turbulent waves, and no birds flew.

‘The Choptank knows,’ she whispered. ‘It feels the gathering terror.’

When the sun rose on the stormy scene, Edward found her shivering there, contemplating the spiritual disasters which the good people of this river would always bring down upon themselves.

ON SEPTEMBER 14, 1701, ROSALIND JANNEY SET
forth on one of the saddest journeys a woman can take. She was leaving her respected home, her family of distinguished ancestry, her two sisters with whom she had lived in harmony, and the dogs and horses that loved her. Such deprivation would have been adequate cause for lamentation, but in this instance she was also surrendering one of the loveliest plantations in Tidewater Virginia, with its own wharves and shipyard on the Rappahannock, and heading for some primitive wilderness in Maryland across the bay, and that was true misery.

But she was determined to make this sad journey in what her family would describe as good spirits. She had been born twenty-six years ago, an ugly child—‘And that’s a curse when it’s a girl,’ said her mammy—but in spite of her forbidding looks, her lively father had insisted upon naming her after one of Shakespeare’s most beautiful and witty women. ‘Fair Rosalind,’ he called her, especially when guests were present, and all who heard this doting description had to be aware of its inappropriateness.

As a child, Rosalind burned inwardly at this teasing, for no matter what jokes her father made, no matter what passages he read from the play in which the real Rosalind appeared, she knew that her face was too large, and too red, and too filled with protruding teeth. When she reached the age of twelve and could read Shakespeare for herself in the heavy book Fithians had sent, she found the play ridiculous.

‘Imagine,’ she told her mother, ‘wandering through a forest in boy’s clothes, and talking for hours with a young man who’d fallen in love with you when he saw you as a girl, and he never suspects it’s you.’

‘You could dress in boy’s clothes,’ her mother said, ‘and no one would notice.’

Smiling, she observed, ‘But the real Rosalind was beautiful.’

‘You’ll be beautiful, too, when everything falls into place.’

Her younger sisters, who had grown into handsome young ladies, often repeated this promise: ‘When you’re older, Roz, everything will fall into place.’

This did not happen. She grew tall, but though she had no lack of appetite, her figure remained distressingly thin. She suffered the ignominy of watching suitors come in their shallops down the Rappahannock, but always for her sisters. When it became evident that the younger girls must make their matches now, while they were in full bloom, as it were, she graciously stepped aside, telling her parents, ‘I think Missy should marry the Lee boy. He seems a proper match.’ And she also urged the marriage of Letty to the Cowperthwaite lad.

Last year, at twenty-five, she had been aimless, a tall, awkward young woman, participant in no social life and left increasingly alone. She had turned to reading, and one afternoon when summer insects buzzed along the shores of the river, she took sardonic refuge in the play which had caused so much of her misfortune. ‘What rubbish!’ she sniffed as Orlando laid out the ludicrous plot. But then she came upon that scene in which Rosalind and her cousin discuss the fate of women, and it seemed as if Shakespeare had intended specifically for her every word these two intelligent creatures spoke:

That’s it! Rosalind Janney thought. Beautiful women are stupid, and the brilliant ones ugly. Well, I’m ugly and that entitles me to be brilliant. So I’ll be damned brilliant.

From that moment her life changed. She saw no suitors, for she grew increasingly gaunt and mannish, but she did see how a plantation should be run. She mastered the art of raising sweet-scented tobacco, curing it in long, low sheds, packing it in hogsheads and loading it aboard the ocean-crossing ships that tied up at her father’s wharves. She became adept in estimating whether the plantation tobacco would bring more at London or at Bristol, where ships from Virginia rarely put in. And to everyone’s surprise, she became quite canny in the management of slaves,
knowing when to buy or sell, and how best to utilize the hands assigned to various tasks. After a year of intense study she transformed herself into a proficient manager, never harsh or overweening but keenly aware of all that happened within her domain.

Her father, watching her single-minded concentration, understood the substitution she was making—the manager instead of the mistress—and it distressed him that a daughter of his should be forced into such an unproductive alley. He began to take special interest in her and to talk with her more than he had ever done with her sisters.

‘Stop worrying, Fair Rosalind. It’s my job to see you catch yourself a husband.’

‘I’ve surrendered that longing.’

‘Never! You’re too precious a melon to lie wasting on the vine.’

She abhorred the image but said nothing that might displease her father; she did become embarrassed when she discovered that he had been discussing her with young men of the region, offering them a considerable portion of his holdings, including even a stretch of riverfront, if they would marry his eldest daughter. There were no takers, for even with six hundred acres plus a mooring on the Rappahannock, this ungainly girl was no catch, and she knew it.

She was therefore irritated when her father continued to press the subject. ‘Fair Rosalind, you’ll be married sooner than you ever dreamed.’

‘What tricks are you dreaming of now?’

He did not reply. Instead he drew his forbidding daughter to him, pulling her into the shade of the spacious house he had built for his daughters and their mates. ‘Sweet little Roz,’ he whispered, half chidingly, ‘did you think I’d allow the granddaughter of a Cavalier who rode with Prince Rupert …’

Rosalind’s determination to live with reality meant that even her enthusiastic father’s legends must be subjected to rational inspection. ‘Our old goat never rode with Rupert, and in no possible way could he consider himself a Cavalier.’

‘Your grandfather …’

‘Was in charge of horses at an inn, and very daringly he gave Prince Rupert six of the best.’

‘And on one of those six he rode off gloriously to fight with the prince at Marston Moor.’

‘The dear bumbler never got close to Marston Moor, fortunately for us, because he was undoubtedly drunk … at least I never saw him sober.’

‘If I say he was at Marston Moor, and if I say it often enough, he was.’

Like many families in Tidewater Virginia, the Janneys had decided that their glorious ancestor, Chilton Janney, had been a Cavalier dashing across England with Rupert in that unfortunate prince’s futile attempt to defend King Charles I in his brawl with Cromwell’s Roundheads.
Almost no member of Rupert’s cavalry emigrated to Virginia after the decapitation of Charles, but many tidewater families, like the Janneys of the Rappahannock, claimed that they had done so. Their hearts were with Rupert even if their ancestors were not. They were entitled, by extension, to call themselves Cavaliers, for they firmly believed that if they had resided in England at that time, they would certainly have ridden with the prince, had he chanced their way. At any rate, they considered themselves Cavaliers and they behaved as such, and that’s what mattered.

‘I certainly don’t intend to allow the granddaughter of a Cavalier to wither on the vine,’ Thomas Janney said.

Rosalind, who had never been more deeply engaged in the business of living, thought: If anyone’s withering on a vine, it’s Letty. She reads nothing, is interested in nothing, and when she speaks it’s sheer folly. Yet she’s supposed to be luxuriating on the vine because she has a husband, and I’m withering because I don’t. Aloud she said, ‘For a woman of intelligence, this is an upside-down world.’

‘What’d’ya mean?’

She had not intended to say what came out next, but she felt she must puncture her father’s vanities. ‘Why is it, Father, that when we discuss our family you always speak as if we began with Chilton Janney coming to the Rappahannock in the 1650s? Why don’t you mention Simon Janney, who started us off on the James in 1610?’

It was traditional among the Janneys of the Rappahannock never to mention Simon, who had lived so miserably among the swamps of the James, and certainly not his wife Bess, a convicted fornicatress purchased from a ship captain. Secretly they were aware that aspects of Simon’s history existed in court records—his acquisition of land, his purchase of slaves, his argument over the ownership of fields along the Choptank, and the manner in which he purchased from Fithians the great estate on the Rappahannock—but they preferred to think that these matters would remain hidden. However, against the possibility of discovery, they had manufactured for Toothless Bess an acceptable lineage: she was now ‘Elizabeth Avery, daughter of a prosperous rural family in Hants.’

‘We don’t speak of those Janneys,’ her father said stiffly, but it was known that when Simon and his scrawny wife assumed control of the present plantation, they brought with them their emaciated daughter Rebecca. She was there when Chilton Janney fled Cromwell’s soldiers; he was her cousin, son of Simon’s brother, who tended stables at an inn north of London, and he was a bright fellow, for he saw quickly that the prudent thing for him to do was marry this graceless girl with the three thousand acres.