Ciji Ware (15 page)

“I said, time for you to go to
bed
, missy,” Mammy insisted, rousing Daphne from her melancholy reverie. “And tomorrow, no more of this, y’hear, or you’ll be just as crazy-sick as your poor mama. Can’t play this ol’ harp all day and night!”

In response, Daphne merely gave a vehement shake of her dark blond head and continued to pluck the strings with even greater force, taking no overt notice of the fact that her father, at long last, had emerged from his study. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw his figure walk unsteadily past the parlor’s open doorway toward the graceful staircase.

Mammy’s large, angular features registered surprise as she and Daphne watched the master of Devon Oaks heavily mount the stairs to the second-floor landing, turn the corner into the hallway, and disappear. The servant shook her head woefully.

“Well, suit y’selves, then,” she grunted loudly above the rolling swell of Daphne’s music. “I’s goin’ to bed! But jus’ remember, if you keep actin’ so crazy, then Miz Madeline, Miz Suki, and Masta Eustice won’t have nothin’ to do with a sister like you when they gets back from Grandmother Drake’s in Natchez. They
never’ll
want to come home from Bluff House with you carryin’ on like this. Mark my words, chile!” The head house servant glanced around the parlor, which was plunged into gloom except for a lone candle burning in its brass holder. “You ’sposed to be the big, brave one, stayin’ at the plantation to help take care of your mama, and jus’ look how you actin’! Now you take that candle up with you to bed, and be sure you blow it out, y’hear me?”

Heaving a sigh of frustration, Mammy swept out of the parlor and through the house, and disappeared down the back stairs. Without looking back, she strode into the shadows between the big house and the scattering of slave cabins that dotted an acre adjacent to the tobacco fields bordering Whitaker Creek.

Daphne barely heard the clock on the mantel strike nine. However, the door to her mother’s bedchamber must have been left ajar, for suddenly a new sound cascaded down the stairwell, piercing the protective wall of music she’d created around herself. And though Daphne played the chords with all her might, there was no way to escape the strident argument that had begun to rage between her parents.

“You are my wife!” Charles shouted, his words slurring slightly. “I have every right to enter this chamber.”

“You’re
drunk
!”

“And what if I am? ’Tis the only amusement left to me.”

“Have you no decency?” her mother cried brokenly. “Our baby barely three weeks in his grave, and you barge in here—”

“He was my son, too!” exploded Charles. “They
all
were my sons, and my daughters, and now they’re all
dead.
But can I allow myself to lie on a faintin’ couch, howlin’ to the moon and carryin’ on as if I were the only one who suffered?”

“You simply don’t understand!” her mother cried. “I carried that child in my body. He was alive and then God—”

“God!”
Her father spat the word as if it were poison. “You think God bothers ’bout one more mewlin’ infant in this world? You’re just a poor breeder, that’s all. Sickly, like the children you produce. Show some spine, woman! Devon Oaks is on the edge of catastrophe. Pull yourself together!”

By this time, Daphne had ceased playing, mesmerized by the bitterness that had transformed her father’s voice into a cruel weapon.

“A king has lost his head in Paris, Susannah! Britain and France are at war, and those damnable blockades make my tobacco virtually worthless, even if the land it’s growin’ on wasn’t dyin’ out. Can you think of nothin’ but your own woes?”

“That’s right!” her mother screamed. “Weep your crocodile tears over money, Charles Whitaker! I merely ask for a little compassion—and for you to satisfy your carnal desires someplace else. I suggest the brothels Under-the-Hill!”

“I weep that you cannot bear a male child with any spirit to live,” he retorted viciously.

“Do you care so little for the one son you
do
have that you doom Eustice to the grave as well? You terrify him, making him ride that big horse.”

“Eustice is the sissy that you have made him. He clings to your skirts and takes after your snivelin’ brother, Drake.”

“Eustice is easily frightened by bullies like you,” Susannah retorted, “and who wouldn’t be? But, surely, you cannot blame
me
for his delicate constitution. Your own father wheezed around animals as well, and—”

The report of a palm against flesh and her mother’s scream pierced the heavy night air.

“Silence, woman!” Charles growled. “’Tis your family, not mine, that brings me grief.”

Downstairs, Daphne sat frozen on the padded stool, her narrow chest slumped against the harp, the callused tips of her fingers clinging to the strings like a prisoner holding onto the bars of a jailhouse window. Her father must be seriously in his cups to slap her mother’s face and shout such abominable things to a woman barely risen from childbed, Daphne thought.

“Grief?”
Susannah Whitaker shrieked. “You dare speak to
me
of grief?”

“You cannot… refuse me a healthy son,” Charles roared. “My slaves obey me… and so must you, Susannah!”

“Charles, you can’t be thinking—”

Her mother’s protests were abruptly cut off. Daphne’s heart hammered in her chest and she renewed her efforts to blot out the horror of her parents’ exchange by attacking the harp strings with renewed vigor. Nonetheless, the first few bars of the fugue were not nearly loud enough to drown out her mother’s hysterical protests.

An extended, bloodcurdling scream raised the hair on the nape of Daphne’s neck. Her fingers on the strings froze in place. An unearthly, low keening floated down the stairwell.

“No… no… oh, God… noooo!”

It was her mother’s voice, muffled. And then silence. What was happening? Daphne wondered with alarm. Had her father completely lost his temper and seriously injured poor Mama? She rose from her music stool and swiftly mounted the stairs. Devon Oaks was deadly quiet for the first time in weeks.

Well… almost quiet, Daphne considered, tiptoeing toward her parents’ bedchamber. The moans commenced again, only this time they were much softer and prolonged, with an accompanying change in pitch and timbre. There was another sound as well, deeper, more guttural, as if a racehorse had just been reined in, heaving hollow, rasping breaths.

Worried and confused, Daphne pushed against the half-opened door and peered into the bedchamber. Her eyes soon grew accustomed to the gloom lit only by a solitary candle affixed in a cut-crystal holder on the bedside table. A pair of breeches, a linen shirt, and a pair of riding boots lay strewn on the floor A figure hovered like an attacking vulture over her mother’s inert form. And then her naked father grunted and fell on his wife’s chest where her nightdress bunched around her neck.

Neither Charles nor Susannah Whitaker saw their young daughter standing, stunned, in the doorway. Reeling from shock, she retreated, leaving the door ajar. In the hallway, her entire body was overtaken with trembling as if in the grip of a deadly ague. She sped down the stairs and pounced on the harp strings with all her strength.

I won’t listen… I won’t listen… I won’t listen…

Her mind whirled in a litany of denial as she plucked each note of the Prelude with a vengeance. She began to sing loudly.

“Da-da-da… da-da-da-da…”

Concentrate
on
the
notes
…
play
them
as
loud
as
you
can
…
and
those
other
sounds
will
fade
away. Sing
…
sing
…
sing!

The terrified thirteen-year-old crooned in time to the music as she banged her blond head against the harp’s polished wood sounding board. She had no notion how long she’d attempted to blot out what she’d witnessed on the second floor. Mammy’s daughter, Kendra, appeared silently in the hallway that opened into the foyer. Before Daphne could react, she was startled into silence by the thud of heavy footsteps overhead and the appearance of her father on the landing above. He pounded his fist on the banister.

“Cease that noise
at
once
,” Charles thundered. He was bare-chested, dressed only in breeches, and carried his boots in one hand. “I will not have
two
females in this household screechin’ like banshees. Go to bed, girl, and not another
sound
!”

He turned on his heel and stalked in the direction of the guest wing. Kendra McGee had remained still as a statue, unseen by her master. The young black slave stared at Daphne for a long moment as silence descended upon the house. The fourteen-year-old glided noiselessly across the Persian carpet to stand by Daphne’s side.

“Mammy worried you’d forget to snuff the candle,” she whispered, nodding in the direction of the brass holder perched on top of the pianoforte nearby. “She say for you to come wid me.” Her dark, expressive eyes peered compassionately at her playmate. Then she laid a sympathetic hand on the sleeve of Daphne’s dimity nightdress. “Mammy say, it’s all right for you to sleep wid us out back tonight.”

***

A black cat, resplendent with a white bibbed tuxedo chest and matching ivory paws that gleamed in the light of the lamp in Maddy’s parlor, rubbed its furry flank sensuously against Daphne’s leg, startling her nearly witless. The feline delicately nibbled the harpist’s anklebone.

“Groucho! Ow! Bad kitty!” Daphne cried, startled into present reality. Groucho appeared oblivious to the reprimand, changed directions, and rubbed his opposite flank against Daphne’s calf while she attempted to catch her breath.

Whoa, there! What was
that?

Where in the world had she been just now? One minute she’d been sitting in Maddy’s cluttered parlor, idly fingering Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in C Major on her cousin’s antique harp, and the next, she was observing a family drama of Wagnerian proportions in some place called Devon Oaks Plantation!

But it wasn’t just
any
plantation house, was it? she reminded herself, her heart pounding in her chest. Devon Oaks had once belonged to the family of Maddy’s husband, the late Marcus Whitaker. She’d seen a picture of it somewhere in Bluff House and remembered Cousin Marcus speaking of it fondly.

Apprehensively, she glanced around the shadowed parlor, noting that Groucho had abandoned her legs and was pacing in a circle on the seat of the horsehair settee. After a few moments, he nestled comfortably in a comer and languidly closed his eyes.

Easy
for
you
to
do!

Daphne wondered, after tonight’s bizarre episode, if she’d ever be able to sleep a wink in this house—or any other old mansion, for that matter. The unrelenting wails were of a woman obviously suffering from acute postpartum depression after the death of her child—an infant that was one in a string of closely spaced pregnancies that had probably caused poor Susannah Whitaker’s hormones to yo-yo.

If
ever
there
were
a
Susannah
Whitaker!

She tried to recall any talk about mental illness in the Whitaker, Duvallon, or Kingsbury family lines. As far as she’d observed, her mother merely exhibited the average neurotic, narcissistic behavior of a female trained since babyhood to be a “magnolia.” Her father’s borderline alcoholism came with the territory for all those “good ol’ boys” in the great state of Louisiana, as King would say. Maddy admitted to suffering from depression, but who wouldn’t, losing two close family members in the same year? As for herself, the report to her insurance company when she’d gone to visit Dr. Yankowitz in New York after her aborted wedding had labeled their work together “life adjustment after loss of a significant other.” Surely, Dr. Y. would have told her if he thought she had a screw loose?

With a wary eye on the sleeping cat, Daphne stood and stretched her arms over her head. Numbing fatigue invaded every sinew and corpuscle. She reached for the solitary light and switched it off.

It
was
a
dream…
she fretted silently.
It
felt
real, but it couldn’t be…