Chesapeake (48 page)

At breakfast next morning she warned her husband that this foolish marriage must not go forward, but he ignored her protests on the grounds that to halt things now would be embarrassing. She tried to point out that a moment’s trivial embarrassment was less significant than a lifetime of wastage, but he had already summoned the priest and the servants. The Claxtons came down late, hoping to make a grand entrance, but when Rosalind saw them she could not stifle her laughter. ‘Fitzhugh,’ she whispered, ‘you can’t go ahead with this.’

‘Everyone’s here,’ he said brightly, stepping forward to greet Mrs. Claxton.

But when he led the two young people into position before Father Darnley, Rosalind cried in a loud voice, ‘Stop this farce!’

‘What …’ Mrs. Claxton made a strangling sound and looked as if she might faint.

‘Get them out of here!’ Rosalind ordered. ‘Out, I said! All of you, out!’

The slaves responded first, retreating through an open door. The white indentures followed, shoved along by Rosalind, who then faced the bewildered Claxtons. With her arms bent at the elbow, as if her fists were eager to strike, she said quietly, ‘The farce is ended. Take yourselves home across the bay.’ And she did not let up until her visitors were on the porch with their bags beside them.

‘This is infamous!’ Mrs. Claxton protested as Fitzhugh attempted to console her, but Rosalind would permit no conciliation.

‘You are to go home,’ she said sternly. ‘This has been a dreadful mistake, and I have behaved poorly. But you must leave.’ And she stood in the doorway as if guarding it lest they try to return to the house. Tall and resolute, she glowered at them like some clear-seeing goddess, and after a while they crept to their sloop, whose bow headed toward Annapolis.

Fitzhugh was outraged by his wife’s behavior and might have tried to chastise her, except that Father Darnley was watching, doing his best to appear dissociated from this scandal; but as the priest went to the sloop, which would take him, too, back to Annapolis, Rosalind involved him in her strategy. ‘Sweet Father, you know what happened. Now find us a bridegroom for this girl.’ He affected not to hear, so she placed herself before him and said, ‘Tell the young men that I shall settle upon her a great share of my own dowry. But for the love of God, do something to save this soul.’

When the sloops were gone and the Steeds were left to absorb the reverberating shocks Rosalind had generated, Fitzhugh started to fulminate, believing that to be his duty as man-of-the-house, but his attempts were so ludicrous that Rosalind ignored him. Clasping his daughter—really her daughter—she whispered, ‘On this day we did a good thing. Fifty years from now, gentle flower, you’ll look back and laugh, and bless me, for I have saved your life.’

In February 1703, when annual storms swept the Chesapeake, a small boat put into Devon Creek bearing a solitary traveler, a young man, his hair tousled by wind and rain. Finding no one at the wharf, he pulled his homespun jacket about his damp shoulders and started toward the house.

Belatedly an indentured servant spotted him and started shouting, ‘Stranger coming to our landing!’ And down the servant came to warn the young man that this was Steed property.

‘I know,’ the young fellow said, plowing straight ahead. ‘Father Darnley sent me.’

From the doorway Rosalind Steed heard these words and rushed out into the rain to greet the stranger. ‘We are so glad to meet you,’ she said in great excitement, clutching the young man’s arm and leading him to the porch. She watched admiringly as he stamped his feet and swung his arms to brush away the rain.

‘Name’s Thomas Yates, James River. Father Darnley told me you have a—’

Rosalind interrupted, for she saw no need to mask her delight. ‘Evelyn!’
she cried triumphantly. ‘A young man’s come to see you … through the storm.’

Now she was free to tend her garden. Her daughter was married. Her son was doing well at the college in France. And her husband had resumed his routine of some days on Devon, some in the marsh. Even the warehouse in Patamoke was flourishing.

She made it clear to the workmen that she did not wish a formal garden in the English style, like the ones she had known along the Rappahannock. She respected geometrical patterns and understood why they were favored by ladies whose fingers never touched soil; through a change of seasons and alternating blooms such gardens could be attractive, but she loved to work the soil, and to see large results, and this produced her basic strategy: My principal flowers will be trees. Because when you plant trees, you’re entitled to believe you’ll live forever.

So first she studied what trees were already in place, and fortunately, scattered in the space between the wharf and the house stood maples and elms of magnitude, and these she trimmed and cultivated to serve as cornerstones of her planting. Her pride was a white oak of majestic proportion: thirty feet at the base, nearly eighty feet tall and more than one hundred and forty feet in the spread of its mighty branches. It provided enough shade to protect an entire lawn; it had already been sovereign when Captain John Smith named the island, and to it the other trees related.

The lawn contained no red maples, so her opening operation in the fall of 1703 was to transplant three such trees, two of which promptly died. ‘You can’t move trees of that size and expect them to live,’ her husband warned her, but she moved three more, just as large, and these lived. In spring they were harbingers, in autumn the glory of the landing, visible from all parts of the creek as one approached by boat.

Upon this solid foundation she composed the rest of her stupendous garden: dogwood for spring, mountain laurel for summer and huge plantings of pyracantha for autumn, at which time the dogwoods would reappear with clusters of red berries.

‘No tulips, no hollyhocks,’ she said. ‘And for heaven’s sake, no box. I want nothing that has to be coddled.’ She avoided also the peony, the tall magnolia, the phlox and hawthorn. But she was not averse to decoration, for when her large plantings were in position she said, ‘Now for the jewels,’ and in two dozen practical places she planted holly trees—two male, twenty-two female—expecting bright berries of the latter to provide glow at sunset. And when the hollies were started—some to grow forty feet tall—she added her final touch, the extravagant gesture which would make this stretch of lawn her timeless portrait: in seven open areas
where the sun could strike she planted clumps of daylilies, knowing that when they proliferated the areas would be laden with tawny-colored flowers of great vitality and brilliance. July at Devon Island would be unforgettable; the daylilies would see to that.

In 1704 and 1705 her gigantic gardens were sprawling disappointments, for the transplanted maples were husbanding their strength and the daylilies had not begun to multiply—fifty would eventually result from one original—while the rudely transplanted dogwood seemed half dead. Small gardens with small flowers can be transformed in a matter of months; gardens focusing on trees require years. But by 1706 all parts seemed to merge: the oak dominated, its indented leaves bright in the sun, and the maples lent color. But it was the procession of the seasons that gratified: the shimmering white dogwoods of spring; the undisciplined daylilies of early summer; and in the autumn the exuberance of the pyracantha, that noblest of shrubs; and the turning colors of trees set against the permanent green of the enduring pines.

Her garden was a triumph, as durable and generous as she, but sometimes she felt that it displayed its greatest glory in midwinter, when bitter winds swept in from the northwest and snow covered all, with only the pines showing color: now the dogwood slept, and the hidden roots of the daylilies, and the visible buds of the laurel. Even the oak was barren, but then as she walked among the bare limbs she would catch sight of the hollies, those fine and stubborn trees to which the birds of winter came, seeking red berries, and her heart would leap and she would cry: ‘When the last berries are gone, spring begins and all this starts again.’ And she would run in the snow and visualize the beautiful gardens of summer, with the laurel as pale and lovely as any iris.

The garden of her personal life was not flourishing. Her husband now offered no excuses for his frequent absences, and she had to suppose that he was spending them at the marsh. She had never seen Nelly, but chance comments from infrequent visitors kept reminding her that the girl was beautiful and lively—‘She boasts an excellent figure, and why she isn’t married is a mystery.’ The best explanation came from an acidulous woman whose husband managed the Steed offices in Patamoke: ‘She’s a Turlock, and they rarely wed.’

Rosalind had made cautious inquiries as to Nelly’s children and learned that they were rollicking rascals, with their grandmother’s Swedish blond hair and blue eyes—‘Which is a wonder, seeing that they’re mostly Turlock.’

‘What do you mean?’ Rosalind asked.

The conveyor of this information was a woman who envied the Steeds and now pondered how best to wound the mistress of the island. Biting
her lower lip in study, she started to speak, then hesitated, then babbled on, ‘You know, of course, that Flora Turlock, that’s Nelly’s mother … Have you ever seen her, Rosalind?’

Mrs. Steed shook her head, and the woman said, ‘Of course not, how would you?
You
don’t go to the marsh.’

Rosalind smiled, offered more tea and asked, ‘What were you trying to say?’

‘It’s rather ugly, but it’s true. Nelly’s mother was Flora. Her father was Charley.’

‘Charley who?’

‘Charley Turlock—Flora’s brother.’ The woman held her teacup to her lips, then added, ‘Her brother. She had a baby by her brother.’

Without considering what she was saying, Rosalind replied, ‘I read somewhere that the Pharaohs of Egypt married their sisters.’

‘Are you defending such behavior?’

‘Not at all. I’m merely saying …’ She left the sentence unfinished, for it occurred to her that no words would satisfy this woman, and that whatever was said would circulate viciously throughout the community.

‘You know, of course,’ the woman continued, ‘that Flora was publicly whipped for her sin?’

‘There seems to be a great deal of women being whipped in Patamoke.’

‘But …’

‘And I wonder if it does any good.’

‘Mrs. Steed …’

‘And that damnable ducking stool. They reserve it for women, too, and I suppose that if I weren’t the wife of Fitzhugh, I’d be lashed to it and ducked in the Choptank.’

This was heresy, and the visitor assessed it as such; by the shocked look on her face she betrayed her plan to report widely what Mrs. Steed had said, but Rosalind was not finished. ‘I really don’t care whether you repeat what I just said or not. The whipping of women and the ducking stool are the hideous acts of frightened men, and I am sick of them.’

Four days later Fitzhugh returned from Patamoke, distraught. ‘In town the talk concerned your challenge to the authorities.’

‘You mean what I said in defense of Flora Turlock?’ She paused, then added, ‘Nelly’s mother. Your Nelly’s mother.’

This name had never before been spoken in Fitzhugh’s presence, and he was incensed at what he considered his wife’s lack of good breeding. ‘Wives don’t speak of such things. You be careful what you say about whippings … and the ducking stool.’

‘Are you threatening me, Fitzhugh? You must know that’s idle.’

‘I’m reminding you that the magistrates can sentence you, if they wish.’

‘They’ll not wish,’ she said brightly. ‘They’d be loath to humiliate you.’

‘And what do you mean by that?’

‘That so long as you live I can say what I wish.’ Staring at him as if he were a stranger, she added, ‘You’re no longer my husband, Fitzhugh, but you are my protector. And under your protection I shall do as I please, and it pleases me to warn you that the punishments you men mete out to women are barbarous and must be stopped.’

‘When you speak like that, Rosalind, you are very unwomanly. For you deal with things that should not concern a lady.’

Fitzhugh was wrong in thinking that because his wife was ungainly she was unfeminine. No lady on the Choptank awaited the arrival of the next fashion doll more eagerly than she, for whenever she learned that a ship was scheduled to arrive from London, she contrived to be first aboard to catch the precious prize.

Since it would have been impractical for the London fashion houses to publish books showing their creations, and since the newspapers and magazines which reached the colonies were deficient in illustrations, it had become the custom for merchants to construct articulated dolls, fourteen inches high, and dress them in exact replicas of the latest mode. Sandaled and bewigged, these enchanting little figures were boxed and shipped abroad, so that women in the remotest backwaters could know the proper length of hem.

In May 1706 the snow
Fair Rosalind
made a scurried trip from London and put into Devon with one of the most tantalizing dolls ever to have crossed the Atlantic. It showed a trim little lady wearing a pale-blue coif adorned with six tiny rows of lace and a dress that caught the breath because of its innovation. Over a gold-brocaded stomacher hung a noble sacque made of heavy bombazine. Rosalind had seen sacques before and liked their normal flowing lines, but this was different, because just below the hips it flared outward at least eighteen inches on each side.

‘How do they do it?’ she asked her fascinated sewing slaves as they fingered the cloth, trying to detect how they must cut it to duplicate the model. Deftly they lifted the layers, and what they uncovered evoked gasps of admiration, for the heavy fabric rested upon four hoops made of delicate, bent wood.

‘How wonderful!’ one of the slaves cried, dropping the skirt, raising it, dropping it again.

‘We can make!’ another said enthusiastically, following one of the seams with her finger.

But Rosalind had developed a sure sense of what to wear and what to avoid, and she disappointed the slaves by saying, ‘Not for me. Those hoops would make me look even bigger.’ The women sighed as she cut the hoops away with her little scissors, but they had to agree that when the heavy sacque was allowed to fall free, it looked better for a tall woman.