Chesapeake (52 page)

So the slaves were ordered to ready the
Fair Rosalind,
and on it Rosalind and Mark made the long sail to the Rappahannock. The degree of business deterioration they found, and the inability of the Janney sons-in-law to rectify it, were not the memorable aspects of this trip; Rosalind’s remorseless disparagement of her younger sisters was.

Missy and Letty were now in their early thirties, each the mother of children and each as vacuous as a woman could be. They affected ignorance of all plantation matters, and when Rosalind spoke harshly of the looming catastrophe, the best they could do was whimper. They never appeared in their kitchens, leaving such matters to their slaves; knew nothing of family expenditures, and considered the Janney ships as mere conveyors of merchandise from London to their drawing rooms. What had to leave the plantation for London did not concern them.

The appalling part, to both Rosalind and Mark, was that they were rearing their attractive daughters for the same kind of life: rise at ten; eat heavily at noon; do a little sewing, but never on any garment of practical use; sleep through the afternoon; visit; chatter; change clothes; overeat at night; drink a little sherry while the men drank port; and never, never enter a shed in which tobacco was being cured.

It was Mark who detected the awful penalty exacted by this system. ‘The wastage of the wives can’t be prevented. It’s the destruction of the men that’s so painful. If your sisters tell me one more time, “Rosalind can manage such affairs, she was the clever one,” I’m going to strike someone. Either one of them could have been as clever as you, Rosalind. They could have been, I know it, and they’ve wasted their lives, and their husbands’ lives and now the plantation.’

‘You’re not entirely correct,’ Rosalind said. ‘For a woman to become as fine … No, I mean that for a woman to achieve her capabilities, she must have an example. She cannot discover truth by herself.’

‘What example had you?’

‘William Shakespeare.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘It means that I was an ugly child—had no young men pursuing me—and in God’s grimness I could do nothing but read. I read all of that heavy book you see on the table near the window, and I warrant it hasn’t been opened since I left.’

‘I couldn’t understand Shakespeare,’ Mark said honestly.

‘Nor could I … the first two times. Character consists of what you do on the third and fourth tries.’

‘I want to get out of here, Rosalind. There’s nothing we can do for these doomed people.’

‘Now we face the third and fourth try,’ his mother said, and they spent two agonizing months trying to reorient the Janney plantation. Mark worked with the sons-in-law, both older than himself, showing them how they must supervise their distant fields and balance their funds: ‘Order from Fithians only those things that will enable you to create new wealth on the land you already have. Either you produce more wealth here or you perish.’

Rosalind was much harsher. Without betraying Fithians’ confidences, she forced her sisters and their husbands to construct a four-year accounting and showed them the awful downward drift of their fortunes: ‘No more clothes from Europe, only the raw cloth. You can learn to sew. No more expensive trips. Your children can learn in Virginia what they require. Three slaves in the house. All the others at productive work.’

‘What work?’ Letty simpered.

‘Damn it! God damn this foolishness! You ask what work? And your accounts show that you buy shoes, you buy barrels, you buy jackets, you buy furniture that Fithians import from Flanders. Stop it! Stop all this idiotic buying and make the things yourselves.’

‘I can’t make furniture,’ Letty said.

‘Then teach your slaves to do it.’

‘How?’

‘There are books. If you’d been importing books …’

‘That’s for you to say. You were always the clever one.’

In disgust Rosalind turned her back on her lovely sisters; they were beyond salvation. But their husbands still had a chance—‘If you work diligently for five years, you may salvage this place. If you don’t, it will go bankrupt, and on one of the convoys Fithians will send you not great packages of lace and silk but a manager to supervise the sale to someone better qualified.’

Tears filled her eyes as she left her childhood home, that lovely, quiet place where the lawns stretched forever, but this sentimental farewell did not dampen her fury, and when the Steed sloop was well down the Rappahannock she sat with Mark and talked boldly. ‘When this boat reaches Devon, I shall get off at the headland and walk the rest of the way.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it’s going to carry you to Peace Cliff. And it’s there you will disembark. And you will walk up that hill and ask Richard Paxmore for the hand of his daughter Amanda.’

‘But …’

‘Mark, you’ve seen the alternative. If strong men like you don’t marry the finest women available, what will happen to humanity?’

‘She’s not Catholic.’

‘I have no comment. I simply have no comment because that’s not a relevant statement.’

‘But Quakers …’ He paused. ‘Look at the old woman. She’s all fire.’

‘I’m all fire. When I’m seventy the people of the Choptank will hate me. Because I will never stop being as strong as I can. I will not tolerate surrender, and I will not stand by and watch the best of the Steeds, their one great hope, make foolish errors. Louise Fithian just died. Now get yourself a real wife.’

Amanda was not surprised when Mark Steed came to her door proposing marriage, and later when Rosalind arrived to arrange details, the prim little girl confided, ‘I realized these things take time.’ In her strong-willed way she announced one decision which took her family by surprise: ‘Mark’s Catholic, so we’ll be married by a priest.’ And it was the Paxmores’ sloop, not the Steeds’, which sailed to Annapolis to fetch Father Darnley.

In these momentous affairs Fitzhugh Steed took no part. Regarding the troubles at the Janney plantation he said, ‘They’re your family, Roz. Straighten ’em out.’ And when his son announced that he was marrying the Paxmore girl, he said, ‘One woman’s about as good as another. I never suffered from marryin’ a Protestant.’

He had grown careless in speech, affecting the dialect used by local watermen. Days would pass without his being seen at Devon, and Rosalind became accustomed to watching him climb into a bateau alone and head down the creek toward the marsh. He never spoke of the Turlock girl, and surprisingly, Rosalind had not yet seen her. With Mark spending increased time with his new wife, there was little opportunity for him to tend the growing warehouse in Patamoke, and thus Rosalind’s source of information on her husband’s mistress evaporated.

It was a strange world she occupied: wife to a man she scarcely knew and whose bed she no longer shared, organizer of a vast plantation belonging to others. Now, with her stepchildren launched into lives of their own, her entire emotional life concentrated on her three children. Samuel, aged eight, showed signs of becoming another Mark; he was intelligent, quick to respond and lively, but he already had his father’s inclination toward irresponsible gallantry, so that Rosalind often wondered if he would ever establish a solid base to his life.

Pierre, almost two years younger, named for a friend her husband had relied upon while at St. Omer’s, was quieter, a stalwart little fellow with reddish hair. He seemed to love animals and the quiet places in the wooded garden his mother had created, and he had a passion for speaking French with his father. Rosalind never felt that she knew Pierre, for he had a stubborn character and withheld confidences, but what she saw of him she liked. ‘He’d make a good Quaker,’ she said of him once when he had obstinately refused to obey.

Rachel was fun, a laughing little girl of five who gave every indication of becoming a giddy woman, like her aunts at the Janney plantation. She flirted with her father, on the rare occasions she saw him, and was fiendishly skilled in manipulating her older brothers. She seemed much above average in intelligence and delighted in using words more complicated than she could understand. ‘Pierre is apprehensive,’ she once said, intending to say that he was being difficult. Whenever Rosalind caught the child playacting or abusing her privileges, she thought: When she grows up she’ll acquire common sense. Rosalind put great store in common sense and prayed that all her children would achieve it.

The affection she displayed for them sometimes surprised those who visited Devon, for it was common belief that intelligence forestalled love; this reasoning prompted many in Patamoke to justify Fitzhugh’s dalliance with the Turlock girl—‘He must have a very cold bedroom at home, with that one.’ Yet here were three delightful children belying that assumption, for they were the offspring of Rosalind’s passion, not his.

She was, indeed, the best mother that either the Janneys or the Steeds had so far produced, a loving, careful, understanding woman who had a clear vision of what her children might become. She taught them their numbers and insisted that they read at a level constantly higher than apparent capacity. She badgered her husband about finding a tutor for the family, pointing out that if a satisfactory one were imported from England, all the Steed children on the mainland could move to the island and learn their Latin, but Fitzhugh growled, ‘You worked like hell to get ’em off the island, now you propose bringin’ the kids back.’ And he refused to find a tutor.

She felt uncertain of her capacity to teach her sons beyond the rudiments, and as she was casting about for alternatives, she heard of the Jesuit mission recently established at Bohemia, an isolated manor at the northern fringe of the Eastern Shore. It had been located in this unlikely position so as to avoid attention from crusading Protestants who had a penchant for burning Catholic buildings and abusing Jesuits whom they suspected of trying to lead Maryland back into Catholicism. She knew she should look into the situation at Bohemia, but put off doing anything about it.

And then one cold December morning in 1710 she wakened to find the island covered with snow. She was at her window looking out upon the heavy fall as it accented the bright berries of the holly and set in bold relief the stark branches of the oak, when she saw her three children, well bundled by their slaves, explode from the front door and run helter-skelter through the drifts. She was amused at first, and watched with interest as they disappeared toward the wharf, only to come charging back. Rachel protested tearfully that her brothers had struck her with snowballs; but when they stopped to comfort her, she ground her mittens
into their faces, smearing them with snow she had kept hidden behind her back.

And in that childish play, with the red sun of late December shining on their faces, they warned Rosalind that the time had come when she must move them away from Devon and out into the mainstream of mathematics and Shakespeare and the Catholic philosophers. The boys were only eight and seven, but already the years were wasting.

As soon as the snow stopped falling, she ordered the slaves to prepare the sloop, and on the first bright day when the winds abated she packed her sons into warm clothing and placed them aboard. It was indicative of her determination that she did not bother to consult Fitzhugh on this drastic decision, but even if she had wanted to she could not have done so, for he was in the marshes.

They sailed north past the latitude of Annapolis, and then past the mouth of the beautiful Chester River, and on to the Elk, which led them to the Bohemia River, up which they sailed as far as possible before reverting to oars. The persons they asked regarding the Jesuit settlement viewed them with alarm and would reveal nothing, but at last the sloop tied up at a wharf beyond which it could not proceed, and here a woman grudgingly conceded, ‘The Papists is yonder,’ and she indicated a pitifully small footpath leading into the forest.

Two slaves walked ahead, brushing the snow from the low-hanging branches, and two others followed, carrying the small possessions of the boys. In the middle strode Rosalind, her skirts tied above her knees with cords, her hands clutching Samuel and Pierre. In this manner the Steeds approached the Jesuits.

One priest was in attendance, and he was supervising a holding of more than eight hundred acres, a few in tillage, most in unexplored woodland. The mission church was small and wooden; the rectory in which the priest and his helpers lived was little more than a windblown shack.

‘We have no school here,’ the priest apologized.

‘I did not expect one,’ Rosalind said.

‘What can we do with your sons?’

‘You can teach them to work … to read Latin … to become fine young men.’

She was so persuasive, and she offered so heartily to pay the Jesuits for their trouble, that the priest could not arbitrarily refuse her. He invited her party of seven to stay with him that night; the slaves could sleep in corners of the mission, the Steeds on the floor before the hearth. As the short day ended, and the fire threw shadows on the glazed-paper windows, they talked of Maryland and the Steeds: ‘I’ve heard of your family. Didn’t your husband attend seminary in France?’

‘He’s not the seminary kind,’ she said gently, pulling her long limbs
tightly to her to conserve warmth. ‘But he did study in France, and so did my son Mark … at St. Omer’s.’

The priest looked askance at this; her age belied a son old enough to have graduated from St. Omer’s. ‘My stepson,’ she explained. ‘He married a Quaker girl. And I’m not Catholic, either.’

‘But you would bring your sons here …?’

‘Father. I do not want my sons to be barbarians. It’s as simple as that.’

‘I suppose it is,’ the priest replied, and he began reciting the reasons why it would be both impractical and impossible for them to remain at the mission: no place for them, inadequate food, no schoolbooks, no teachers, no stability in the wilderness. He went on and on, and when he was finished, Rosalind said, ‘Good, I’ll leave them with you and be gone in the morning.’

It was merciful that she forced the Jesuits to keep her sons, because on the return trip, when her sloop was about to enter the Choptank, the slave who was steering suddenly screamed, ‘Pirate ships!’ And dead ahead, bearing down on them at a distance of about two miles, came two Caribbean ships lined with portholes bearing guns and decks crowded with marauders. They had chosen the winter to invade the bay, gambling that no English warships would be on station, and now, with their monstrous advantage in guns, they were free to ravage as they willed.