Chesapeake (46 page)

The ceremony surprised her; it was almost indistinguishable from her sisters’ in the Church of England, and Father Darnley, a big, relaxed man, did everything reasonable to make her feel at ease. When the prayers ended she asked to speak with him and Fitzhugh alone. ‘Our children shall be reared as Catholics. And I will want to attend Mass with my husband, but I think it best that I do not convert.’

‘There’ll be no pressure from me,’ Steed assured her.

‘Nor from me,’ Father Darnley echoed. He had lived in Maryland too long to retain the missionary zeal of his youth and in recent years had seen too much of the fatal struggle between Catholic and Protestant to believe that the old days of Catholic domination would ever return.

‘Do you realize,’ he asked, as he folded his ceremonial garments, ‘that when our capital was moved from St. Mary’s City to Annapolis, guards
were posted at the central square forbidding any Catholic to walk on the street facing the new buildings … lest we profane them?’

‘Can that be true?’ Steed asked.

‘It’s still true,’ Darnley affirmed, whereupon both he and Steed broke into laughter.

‘My footfall endangers the state!’ Steed shook his head, then warned his new wife, ‘You see the infamous circle you’re joining.’

‘My sisters kissed me goodbye as if I were quitting the known world.’

‘In a sense you were,’ the priest said. ‘But you’ll find solace living here in Maryland—with the Steeds and their promise of greatness, and the Catholics and their promise of immortality.’ He hesitated just long enough to convey the impression that what he had said was jest. ‘I’m famished. We must all eat … and I wouldn’t be offended if we also drank.’

Rosalind arranged it so that Father Darnley sat next to Evelyn, and during the festivities, managed by eleven blacks, she kept an eye on her new daughter and saw with satisfaction that a lively conversation was under way. Toward the end of the banquet she moved to the other side of the priest and asked, ‘What have you been able to tell her of the Claxtons?’

‘A splendid Catholic family, well regarded in Annapolis.’

‘And Regis?’

‘A fine Catholic.’ He said this with falling inflection, as if that were all he could say of the young man or all he wished to say.

‘But not an exciting prospect for a husband?’ Rosalind asked bluntly.

‘Exciting? No. Trustworthy? Yes.’

‘I see,’ Rosalind said, and from the manner in which Darnley turned from her to attack his persimmon pudding she knew that he would confide no more. In his human alphabet young Claxton rated zed.

Now the day ended. Slaves carted away the remnants of the feast and fires were lit in the black quarter, where women, coming in from the fields, were offered pieces of the wedding cake. On Devon Creek the first wild geese of autumn convened noisily and the first really cold breeze swept in from the bay. The priest sat alone in the inglenook, and in her bedroom Evelyn let down her hair and contemplated the unhappy news she had heard that day regarding her intended husband.

In the bridal bedroom Fitzhugh Steed, forty years old, experienced a kind of relief. From the moment his first wife had died, a supremely silly child unequal to the task of living on an island and rearing two children, he had known that he must remarry: the plantation had grown too large and too diverse to be easily handled, and if he wanted it to prosper, he must pay full attention to it rather than to the distracting problems of a household.

Many families in both Maryland and Virginia had wanted to align
themselves with the Steeds of Devon, and various marriages had been proposed, but he wanted no more fatuous brides; one was enough for a lifetime. He required someone exactly like Rosalind: older, of good family, and safely past the age of romantic folly. He needed someone to oversee Evelyn’s getting married and Mark’s introduction to the management of the plantation. As for himself, he had worked out various arrangements, which were proving satisfactory, and sought no additional entanglements from a new wife, but he also recognized that if he did remarry, he would have to honor certain implied obligations, especially those relating to the bed, and he proposed doing so, even though he felt more propelled by duty than by passion.

Therefore, while Rosalind undressed behind a screen he quickly slipped out of his marriage suit and jumped into bed, where he awaited her. When she carried her candle to the nightstand, her dark hair flowing over her shoulders, she looked almost presentable, and from his pillow he cried, ‘Roz! You’re downright beautiful!’ And he reached out his hand. She would never forget that gesture; she often wondered what force of character had been required for him to make it, but she was grateful that he had done so.

‘I want to be a good wife,’ she said as she blew out the flickering light.

‘You’re going to be the best,’ he assured her, pulling her into the bed.

On the wintry afternoon of New Year’s Day, March
25,
1702, Rosalind informed her apathetic husband that she was pregnant, and in the following September she gave birth to a son, Samuel. Often, in later years, she would wonder what miracle had allowed her to have children by her strange and diffident husband; actually, she would have three, two boys and a girl, and each pregnancy would seem an accident, the result of a performance which had no meaning and certainly no spiritual significance. She once summarized her position: If Fitzhugh owned a valuable cow, he would feel responsible for getting her bred to a good bull. He feels the same about me. But then she frowned: ‘I’m worthy of better than this’—and she vowed that she would always manifest that worthiness.

After the birth of her first child, Rosalind annoyed her husband by insisting that she be allowed to inspect all the Steed holdings. At first Fitzhugh supposed that this meant the barns and fields on Devon Island, and he was annoyed when she told him one morning, ‘Today I should like to see the warehouse at the landing.’ When she surveyed the settlement now known in official documents as Ye Greate Towne of Patamoke she was impressed, for although it was little more than a village, it had a bustling quality. The tavern at the waterfront was commodious; the Steed warehouse was imposing; the Paxmore Boatyard quite filled the
eastern end; and a bright new courthouse complete with whipping post, stocks, pillory and ducking stool was being built. The town contained only one street running parallel to the harbor, and it was broken by a large square left open but surrounded by posts set in earth.

‘That’s our slave mart,’ Fitzhugh said proudly. ‘We do an honest business there.’ But Rosalind thought: Compared with the way we managed our plantation on the Rappahannock, you do no business at all. But that will change.

Her energies were directed to Devon Island, and the more she saw of the slipshod way in which the various Steeds discharged their responsibilities, the more astonished she became that it survived. There was little orderliness and less logic; the six thousand acres were planted helter-skelter, and the eighteen white servants and thirty-five slaves were assigned arbitrarily to tasks which might or might not prove productive. The two ocean ships rarely left either Devon or Bristol with full cargoes, and no one assumed responsibility for their thrifty utilization. It was rule by hazard, and the fact that Devon continued to exist was due more to its magnitude than to its husbandry.

Rosalind proposed to change this. She started first with the house itself, a rambling affair which had grown to unmanageable dimensions. Summoning the Paxmore brothers from their boatyard in Patamoke, she asked their advice as to what might reasonably be done to bring coherence to the place, and she kept close to them as they studied the situation. They warned her that they were reluctant to take on new assignments, for the building of large ships and small boats occupied their whole attention. The older brother, who did all the talking, said, ‘But we’re indebted to the Steeds for our business and we feel obligated. Let’s see what can be done.’

They were not excited by the possibilities; too many of the accidental excrescences would have to be torn down, but at one point she heard the older brother say, ‘It’s a shame there isn’t a strong central structure. Then we could telescope.’ She asked what this meant, and he said, ‘Come with us to the cliff, and we’ll explain.’

So for the first time she sailed across the river to Peace Cliff and walked up the oyster-shell path to the unpretentious, restful house that stood on the headland, and as soon as she saw it she understood what the brothers meant when they said
telescope.
The humble house built by Edward Paxmore in
1664
was still sturdy, but after his death the growing families of his four children merited additional space, so a larger block of four rooms had been added, with a higher roof line. And when the boatyard prospered, a real house had been added, with an even higher roof line.

The result was a house tall and solid to the left as one approached it, joined by a lesser middle section, which was joined by a noticeably smaller third. The three buildings resembled a collapsible telescope. ‘A
giant could shove them all together,’ Rosalind said approvingly as she studied the design. ‘It’s neat, efficient, pleasing to the eye, and perfect for this cliff.’

She was even more impressed by the simple manner in which the three parts functioned, and when she finished examining the last tidy room she asked, ‘Could you do the same for me?’

‘No,’ Paxmore replied. ‘Thee can build this way only if the first house is solid and uncluttered.’

‘Is ours quite hopeless?’

‘Not at all! Thee has a superb location …’

‘I know the location’s good. What about the house?’

‘It can never enjoy this simple line,’ he said. ‘But it can acquire its own charm.’

‘How?’

‘Tear down the ugly parts.’

It was as simple as that. To achieve a fine house it was essential that the ugly parts not be amended, but torn down completely. This Rosalind was willing to do, but always as she worked with the slaves as they ripped away excrescences, she kept in mind that solemn purity of the Quaker house, and when the time came to start rebuilding she asked the Paxmore brothers if she might return to the cliff to refresh her memory of what she was after.

It was on this second visit that she met Ruth Brinton Paxmore, now a woman of sixty-nine. ‘This is our mother,’ the younger Paxmore son said, and from the first moment Rosalind liked this prim old lady dressed in the austere gray of the Quakers.

They had talked for less than ten minutes when Ruth Brinton interrupted the pleasantries. ‘Has thee any plans at Devon for the manumission of thy slaves?’

‘The what?’

‘When does thee plan to give thy slaves freedom?’

The question was so startling, covering as it did a subject which had never been discussed in Rosalind’s hearing, that she was unable to respond, but her confusion was alleviated by the older son, who explained, in obvious embarrassment, ‘Mother’s always asking people about slavery. Thee mustn’t mind.’

‘But thee must mind,’ the old woman retorted. ‘This is a question we must all face.’ She spoke with such sincerity, with such obvious fire of conscience, that Rosalind said abruptly to the brothers, ‘Go about your business. Your mother and I wish to talk.’

They spoke for two hours, discussing first the trivialities of the kitchen and next the profundities of the church. ‘I had the blessed fortune of knowing thy husband’s great-uncle, Father Ralph. We often talked of Catholicism and he almost persuaded me that if I
were not a Quaker, I ought to be a Catholic. I think thee would be wise to rear thy children as Catholics. It’s the Steed tradition. My children have married Quakers, fortunately, but I’d not be distraught if it had been otherwise.’

‘How many children did you have?’ Rosalind corrected herself: ‘Do you have?’

‘Two boys, who run the boatyard. A daughter, and then very late in life another daughter. Their husbands work in the yard, too.’

‘How fortunate!’

In these two hours Rosalind learned more about the Steeds than she ever had in conversation with her own husband: the rare quality of Father Ralph; the fastidiousness of Henry, who had built the family fortunes; and the curious behavior of his son, Captain Earl, who had fought pirates, and established the shipping contacts, and lived as much in England as in Maryland. ‘He loved the sea and should not have been required to supervise a plantation. It began its downhill course under Captain Earl.’

‘He must have died young.’

‘As a plantation manager he died young. Almost at the start. But as a sea captain he must have reached fifty.’

‘Then what happened?’

‘The scourge of our seas. Pirates. Two of them crept into this river.’

‘Yes. Evelyn told me of them. She said they were Quakers.’

The old lady laughed, and Rosalind was surprised at the vigor of her responses. ‘Quakers, indeed! They were fraudulent in all things and stole from everyone. Captain Earl pursued them and killed the Englishman Griscom. The Frenchman Bonfleur escaped and went on to be the intolerable fiend he still is. Year after year he sought revenge, and then one day he caught thy father’s ship off Barbados … What I mean, Captain Earl was thy husband’s father. He captured it, the ship, that is, killed three of the passengers and sent three back to inform Maryland that Earl Steed had been tortured for two days, then thrown to the sharks.’

‘My God!’ Rosalind sought for a handkerchief, which she held to her mouth. ‘My husband never told me …’

‘Thee would be well advised, Rosalind, not to use the name of the Lord in vain. This is not Virginia, and thee could find thyself in trouble.’

‘Was there no reprisal?’

‘Four vessels built by my sons have been taken by pirates. They ravage at will.’

‘You speak as if they should be punished … even hanged. I thought that Quakers …’

‘We seek peace. But we also protect ourselves against mad dogs. I’ve always felt that when thy father killed that monster Griscom, he could well have slain Bonfleur too.’

‘Isn’t this a remarkable confession, Mrs. Paxmore?’