Heaven and Hell (101 page)

He hadn't seen Marie-Louise in years, and there was a brief period of reintroduction. Charles's manner was brusque.

"Does your father know who really bought the plantation?"

Marie-Louise nodded. "The news was all over Charleston by Saturday noon. Mama said Papa spoke of it at supper that evening."

"And what did he have to say?"

She answered reluctantly. "That--that he liked his sister about as much as he liked everyone else in the family, which--" Red-faced, she blurted the rest: "Which wasn't very much any more."

Charles chewed his cigar so hard he nearly bit it in half. "Fine.

Splendid."

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"Mama was so mad when she told me, she said a curse word. I've never heard her curse Papa before. She said he's making so much money at the company now, he doesn't need Mont Royal, and he hasn't any feeling for the place. That's the reason he sold it." Madeline and Charles exchanged glances she didn't see. "Mama's just miserable over the whole
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business. I am too. Oh, Madeline, what are you going to do?"

"Pack. Wait until Friday. Leave when Ashton arrives. What else can we do?"

Willa took Charles's hand*. No one answered the question.

On Wednesday, at dusk, Willa ran in from the lawn where she'd been teaching Gus a card game. "There's a carriage in the lane. A woman I've never seen before."

"Damnation." Madeline threw an old Spode saucer into the barrel, breaking off part of the edge. "I don't need strangers coming here to peer at us and cluck over our misery."

She heard the carriage grind to a halt. A few moments later, the woman in the gray traveling dress with matching hat and gloves stepped into the doorway. Madeline's exhausted face drained of color.

"My God. Virgilia."

"Hello, Madeline." The two women stared at one another, Virgilia uncertain of her reception. Charles clumped in from the bedroom, where he'd taken down a framed lithograph of the Plain at West Point.

He nearly dropped it when he saw the visitor. Of course he remembered her, principally from her visit to Mont Royal with George and others in her family.

She was a fire-spitting abolitionist in those days. She flaunted a superior morality, and a hatred of all things Southern. He recalled Virgilia outraging her host, Tillet Main, the day James Huntoon came to accuse her of aiding the escape of Huntoon's slave Grady. She'd later lived with the runaway in the North.

Charles particularly recalled her proud, insulting admission of guilt that day. He had trouble reconciling the old Virgilia with this one. He remembered a vicious tongue; now she was soft-spoken. He remembered a slimmer girl; now she was stout. He remembered a careless wardrobe; now she was conservatively fashionable, and tidy despite her long journey. He remembered her with one chin, not two, and it was all a keen reminder of time's passage. In her case, time had dealt kindly.

"How have you been, Charles?" she said. "The last time we saw one another, you were a very young man."

Still bewildered, Madeline remembered her manners. "Won't you sit down, Virgilia?"

"Yes, thank you. I'm rather tired. I sat up on the train all the way
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644 " HEAVEN AND HELL

from Washington." She removed her gloves. On the ring finger of her left hand she wore a diamond in a white gold setting.

Madeline cleared a few stacked books from a chair and gestured the visitor to it. Charles lighted a lamp while introducing Willa. Madeline seemed nervous, on the verge of crying. He presumed it was because Virgilia's arrival was one unexpected event too many. Emotions were strained in the whitewashed house. Pointless arguments had broken

out several times during the past few days.

Virgilia said, "I'd like to stay a day or two, if you'll permit me.

I'm here because George's attorney telegraphed me about Ashton. We must find some way to undo what she's done."

Madeline knotted her apron in her red-knuckled hands. "We have no room here, Virgilia. I'm afraid the best we can offer would be a pallet in the home of one of the freedmen."

"Perfectly adequate," Virgilia said. She radiated a crisp cordiality, and an air of city sophistication. Charles couldn't get over the change.

"Please don't think me rude--" Madeline cleared her throat-- "but I just don't understand."

Virgilia rescued her from the embarrassing silence. "Why I am here after all that happened years ago? Very simple. Once I cared nothing for my family, or my brother's feelings. Now I care a great deal. I know George's high regard for you and Orry, and this place he enjoyed visiting so much. I had opinions that wouldn't allow me to enjoy Mont Royal. I offer no apology for them. I think they were correct, but that's past. I know George would help you financially if that would resolve matters in your favor. Since it won't, and he's still somewhere on the Atlantic, I'd like to help in some other way if I can. I've changed many of my opinions but not my opinion of Ashton. She always impressed me as a shallow, spiteful creature. Especially unkind to the black men and women her father owned."

"She hasn't changed much," Charles said. He raked a match on his boot sole and then puffed on his cigar. "I'm afraid it doesn't matter a damn what any one of us thinks. This place is hers. Come Friday, we have to get out or she'll have the law on us."

Virgilia's old militancy asserted itself. "That is a defeatist attitude."

"Well,

if you've got reason for any other kind, you tell me," he snarled.

Madeline whispered, "Charles."

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Virgilia's gentle gesture of dismissal said she wasn't offended. Willa said, "There's a bit of claret left. Perhaps our guest would like a glass while I fix some supper."

None of them seemed to know what to say next. The uncomfort Crossing Jordan 645

able silence went on and on, until Charles walked out. They heard him calling to his son.

On Thursday, Virgilia asked Charles to stroll dov/n to the river with her. It was a steamy, sunless day, a perfect reflection of their spirits. Charles didn't want to go, but Willa said he niust. To what purpose, he didn't know.

The sawmill had stopped work on Tuesday. Its employees awaited the pleasure of the new owner." On the mill dock by the smooth and placid Ashley, Virgilia walked among stacks of rough-cut cypress lumber.

"Charles, I know that for many years I wasn't very popular with the Mains, and justifiably so. I hope you believe I've changed."

Hands on hips, he gazed at the river. He shrugged to say it was a possibility, but only a possibility.

"All right, then. Do you think we might form an alliance?"

He scrutinized her. "We make a pretty unlikely pair"

"Granted."

"What kind of alliance?"

"One dedicated to defeating that vile woman."

"There isn't any way."

"I refuse to believe that, Charles."

Suddenly he laughed and relaxed. "I heard a lot of stories about you years ago, Miss Hazard--"

She touched the full sleeve of his loose cotton shirt- He noticed her hand--blunt-fingered, work-roughened. "Virgilia," she said.

"Well, all right, Virgilia. I guess if you take all the spite out of
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those stories, what's left is true. You're about as tough as one of my cavalry sergeants." Hastily then: "I mean that as a compliment."

"Of course," she said, with a wry smile. She was pensive a few moments. "We have twenty-four hours."

"I suppose I could shoot her, but I don't want to go to prison, and it wouldn't solve anything. The plantation would just go to this piano merchant she's apparently hitched up with." He sighed. "Wish I could put the calendar back a week or so. Before the sale I might have been able to scare her off. When I was a trader in the Indian Territory, I had a partner who taught me that fear was a powerful weapon, "

Virgilia's interest was piqued. "Wait. Perhaps you've hit on something. Tell me about this partner of yours."

He described Wooden Foot Jackson and some of their experiences.

Then he remembered the incident involving the false travoi s sign, which he described.

"Wooden Foot said fear was so powerful that it co

it. I saw a whole village in those tracks." He shrugged again. He could draw no practical conclusion from the story.

Surprisingly, it excited Virgilia. She whirled around at the edge of the pier. "What you expect instead of what's real--I find that very provocative, Charles. Now tell me more about Ashton. Naturally you've seen her--"

He nodded. "She's older, like all of us. Still dresses like a bird of paradise. I don't know what life's like in Chicago, but she must take good care of herself. She's still a beauty. No change there, either."

He found Virgilia staring with an intensity that puzzled him. She grasped his arm. "Will you go with me to Charleston this afternoon? I must find an apothecary."

He was astonished, but too polite to question her. A half hour later, alone with Willa, he said, "My God, did she fool me. She said she was here to help us. Instead, we have to chase down an apothecary.

She's probably got some female complaint. I think she's as crazy as ever."

On the drive to Charleston, Virgilia explained what she wanted
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from the apothecary's, and why she wanted it. At first Charles was speechless. Then, slowly, his desperation turned skepticism to an almost euphoric hope. Everything on one throw of the dice.

"It might work," he said when she came out of the shop.

"There is a great likelihood that it will not," she said. "That's why we mustn't tell anyone ahead of time, and raise false hopes. Why are you smiling?"

"Thinking of my partner Wooden Foot. He'd like your grit."

"Thank you. Let's hope it isn't totally wasted."

She settled her skirt over her legs and clasped the reticule that held her purchase. Charles shook the reins over the mules and started the wagon toward home. He had no reason to whistle the little tune, but he did anyway.

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The barouche raced up the lane much too fast. The top was in place to spare Ashton and Favor Herrington the dust of a swift journey from town. The two liveried black men hung onto the front seat, grinning like hunters closing on a fox. They didn't know much about what was happening at Mont Royal, but they'd quickly grasped that the white woman was haughty as a queen and tough as a general. They liked working for her.

Behind the barouche rattled a second carriage, less opulent. In this carriage rode two clerks employed by Herrington, and a jowly bailiff of the court who'd been bribed to come along.

As the barouche swayed to a standstill, Ashton felt her heartbeat quicken. She'd slept lightly, restlessly, and jumped out of bed while it was still dark to begin combing and arranging her hair. She was nervous as a virgin in the bridal bed; at least she supposed virgins felt this way.

She hadn't been a virgin for so many years that it was impossible to recall.

This time Herrington had brought a big carpetbag, whose contents he fussily examined as the driver hopped down to open the door on Ashton's side. Great shining lances of sun fell between the massive oaks at the head of the lane; the residue of a river mist was burning off. It was half past nine on what promised to be a sweltering June day.

Ashton's upper lip gleamed with perspiration. Her eyes were lively, and despite her state of nerves she could barely keep from smiling.

She'd spent half an hour choosing her dress, finally selecting a threethousanddollar
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one from Worth's of Paris. It was rose pink, restrained and elegant. Her gloves and little straw hat were black. The black and rose made her powdered face starkly arresting.

Cousin Charles heard the carriages and walked around from the 647

648 HEAVEN AND HELL

other side of the house in that lazy cat's way of his. He wore his old cavalry boots, a pair of white linen trousers turned yellow by time and a shirt with the sleeves rolled above the elbows. His hair was still long as a gypsy's, and as usual he clenched a foul cigar in his teeth. Cousin Charles was no longer young, but exposure to Western weather had given his face the wrinkled toughness of someone much older. Ashton had always found him handsome. She would have found him so today if she didn't hate him worse than a snake because of his family ties.

"Good morning, dear Charles," she trilled. He leaned against one of the studs in the unfinished wall of the new house and stared. If looks were nails, she would be spiked to the barouche.

Insolent bastard, she thought. Herrington summoned his clerks from the second carriage. The bailiff belched and scratched his paunch. He strolled toward the corner of the whitewashed house next door. Charles snatched the cigar out of his mouth.

"Just a minute, you."

Favor Herrington stepped in front of him. "This gentleman can go anywhere he pleases, Mr. Main. He is an officer of the court, and he has the owner's permission. We brought him with us to forestall trouble.

We realize this is not a happy day for you all."

The lawyer fairly oozed sympathy. Charles would have smashed him, but there were bigger fish to be hooked. Looking defeated, he said,

"You won't need him."

"Good, very sensible," Herrington said, giving a nod to the bailiff.

The paunchy man wandered out of sight, pulling at his crotch.

Ashton treated her lawyer to a brilliant smile. "Now Favor, you know what's to be done. These two gentlemen are to visit every home on the plantation. Tell the niggers that all previous arrangements concerning their land are null and void unless they can show written proof of such arrangements, and can also read the terms aloud."

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Herrington nodded crisply. To the pair of pale ciphers accompanying him he said, "Every 'cropper on this place henceforth owes a rental of twenty-five dollars per month, with two months in advance due and payable at five o'clock today. If they can't pay, they can sign one of those employment contracts I drew up. Or they can get out. I'll join you shortly. Get busy."