Wild Midnight (12 page)

Incredibly, in forty-five minutes they were ready. D’Arcy, like a slightly distracted Good Angel, swept through the little house putting everything in order, even mopping up the remains of the spilled soup on the kitchen floor and placing Rachel’s research books back on the bookcase shelves. A few telephone calls, as D’Arcy had said, were all that were needed. Rachel left a message with Billy Yonge and then made a call to Jim Claxton. To her surprise the county agent gave his enthusiastic approval, and added good-humoredly that he was looking up some good movies to tempt her with when she returned. A sudden pang of unexpected embarrassment attacked Rachel, and she stuttered her good-byes and quickly hung up. She was running away, she thought, staring at the telephone. But she felt that if she didn’t get out of Draytonville, even for a few hours, she would go mad.
 

That money Beau Tillson had left behind was a problem. She couldn’t put it in the bank—in her account or that of the Ashepoo River Farmers Cooperative—and give the appearance of having accepted his offer. Nor did she want to put five hundred dollars cash in the mail to him. Worriedly, she considered turning it over to the lawyer, but rejected that when she thought of the questions he would ask. She couldn’t face Pembroke Screven, of all people, not when he’d expressly asked her not to see the man. The only thing she could think of was to deliver it to Belle Haven, and she wasn’t even certain where it was. For a moment Rachel wanted more than anything else to have D’Arcy Butler as her friend so that she could blurt out the whole miserable story.
 

“I have to return the ... the money before I can go, Rachel said. “It doesn’t belong to the co-op.” An explanation was necessary, she knew; finding five hundred dollars scattered over a bedroom seemed to demand it. “Someone made us an offer and I refused it. I really can’t leave without returning it.”
 

“Why sure, honey,” D’Arcy said easily. “You just tell me where you want to go and we’ll drop it off. I know every place around here. I used to spend my summers with my poor old Aunt Clarissa, until she got so crazy my mama wouldn’t have anything more to do with her.” D’Arcy picked up Rachel’s suitcase and started for the front door. “And my lunatic cousin Beau Tillson, who’s just as bad.”
 

“Who?” Rachel stopped, blocking the way.
 

“Who—Clarissa, or Beau? My Aunt Clarissa’s dead, poor old thing. And I thought every female under the age of ninety knew about Beau. He’s
gorgeous—
and
sexy
—honey, you just haven’t lived until you’ve seen a man that good-looking! He should have been a movie star. But then they said that about poor old crazy Clarissa too.” She shrugged. “All she ever had was her looks.” She pushed Rachel through the doorway and outside.
 

“Beaumont Tillson is your cousin?” Rachel could hardly get the words out.
 

D’Arcy set the lock and shut the door behind them. She guided Rachel toward the enormous silver-painted Lincoln Contintental parked under the trees. “Second cousin. Mean as hell—he broke his nose fighting when he was seventeen, beating up on some redneck over a trashy girl, and poor Clarissa had a fit thinking her precious brat had ruined his gorgeous face. Beau wouldn’t even let Clarissa drive him up to Hazel Gardens to the hospital to get it fixed—there’s still a teeny-weeny bump in it. But I just love him to death because when Beau wants to be sweet, he can charm the birds out of the trees. If you haven’t met him—” At the stricken look on Rachel’s face she stopped. “I’ll introduce you,” she ended quickly. “Well, never mind, I can see you don’t want to. Now, where do we take that old money?”
 

“To your cousin,’ Rachel whispered, staring. “To Beaumont Tillson.”
 

D’Arcy Butler’s younger sister had gotten out of the automobile and now stood waiting for them, squinting slightly in the bright morning sunshine.
 

D’Arcy turned to Rachel with an astonished look on her face. “Oh lord, you’ve met! No, don’t tell me about it,” she cried. “I can just see he’s been horrible. What’s he been giving you a bad time about, some of his old cows? That’s all he ever gets excited about, the fool.”
 

“What did Beau do?” the teenager wanted to know, eyeing Rachel owlishly. She stuck out her hand. “Hi, I’m Sissy. Beau’s a nut,” she added laconically.
 

The world seemed to be tilting. Rachel took the younger girl’s hand with a dazed feeling. The tall blond woman darted in between. “Just put the suitcase in the backseat, honey, never mind opening the trunk. We’re going to go over to Beau’s, do you hear? And leave him some money. Rachel has to do that before we can go, and my goodness, it’s going to take for-damn-ever to get out of Draytonville if we don’t get moving!” D’Arcy looked around with her air of distracted gaiety. “Sissy,” she screeched suddenly for her sister, right behind her, “why don’t you be helpful instead of just standing there? Why don’t you scare us half to death and drive us over to Belle Haven?”
 

Soon the Butlers’ massive Lincoln Continental sped silkily down the Draytonville-Hazel Gardens highway, then turned into a winding asphalt road that followed the banks of the Ashepoo River for several miles. D’Arcy chattered nonstop—under the impression, apparently, that Rachel needed a guide to local history. The river road had been laid out following an Indian trail used by French Huguenot and early English planters, although they preferred the river for transport rather than the rough tracks in the forest.
 

“Mostly they built their homes on the river,” D’Arcy explained. “Like Belle Haven—it’s one of the oldest places in South Carolina, did you know that? Each planter had a pier, you can still see the ruins off the point at Old Beaumont Docks. Oh, look,” she cried, “look at all those rice birds, Rachel—you don’t see those up north! There must be hundreds and hundreds of them. That’s the low country, honey—we’ve still got rice birds long after the rice plantations are gone. Can’t make any money anymore growing rice now. Beau says we can’t compete with California. He’s sold on cattle raising, uses the dikes to keep the river out of his pasture instead of flooding it like they used to do. It was so damned beautiful here,” D’Arcy ended abruptly, her quicksilver voice changing. “I never found another place as beautiful as Carolina low country, I swear I didn’t, not any other place in the whole world, and I’ve been a lot of places, since Daddy’s in the Navy. But I’m like all the other Carolina crackers—I always come back.”
 

Rachel rested her head against the window in the rear of the limousine and tried to invent an intelligent response to D’Arcy’s remarks. The effort was too much. The country
was
beautiful—the closer they got to the marshes, the more the melancholy loveliness of this particularly dreaming land settled on them. That the sun was shining brightly, and that there was even a boisterous wind shaking the gray Spanish moss in the trees, did nothing to dispel the feeling.
 

Sissy, driving the big silver car with proficiency, turned onto a road between two green lakes thickly covered with lily pads, their golden yellow buds still unopened in early spring. A flock of white herons rose from the surface and streaked breathtakingly across the sky. Beyond the two lakes the road seemed to dip—down, it seemed, below the river itself. Across fenced, bright green meadows as smooth as carpet, grazed the gray, humpbacked shapes of heat-resistant Brahma cattle. The slave-built earth dikes that kept the Ashepoo River at bay, now long overgrown with grass, could be seen in the distance.
 

“Belle Haven’s built on an old Indian mound.” D’Arcy swiveled in her seat to talk to Rachel in the back. “It’s the highest spot around here, but it still sits right smack in the marsh. The big house used to be about a mile from the river, but the coastline is sinking, has been for two hundred years. Now the river comes right up to the back door. Well, there’s still a lawn,” she added quickly, “but Clarissa wanted to put in a swimming pool in back, and there just wasn’t room anymore.”
 

As the limousine turned into a crushed-shell driveway the big house at Belle Haven finally appeared, no white-columned Greek revival antebellum mansion but an elegant replica of an English manor house of the late seventeenth century.
 

“There—isn’t that something?” D’Arcy cried.
 

The beautiful house was surrounded by deep green lawns, its three-story brick facade a dusty pink gemstone in the pale spring sunlight. It had been designed by the great Restoration architect, Imigo Jones, and had a double curving staircase from the ground floor to a single white door with original brass fixtures. The drive curved in front to allow horse-drawn coach passengers to disembark, and to both right and left of the house were formal gardens filled with flowers and hedges in bloom.
 

They were silent for a long moment, then D’Arcy murmured softly, “It’s so beautiful, isn’t it? It takes a damned fortune to keep it up, and the real money went long before Clarissa died. Went with Lee Tillson when he went back up-country.” She sighed. “That’s the curse of these old families out in the county like this—never have any money, just live down here and work and work, hoping something will come along somehow. Honk the horn, Sissy,” she ordered, “let somebody know we’re here.”
 

“Beau’s gone,” the younger sister said. “I don’t see his jeep in the driveway. Belle Haven’s got a curse on it,” she said over her shoulder to Rachel. “When it was built some slave put a curse on it and said when it fell down all the Beaumonts “would die out.”
 

“That’s not very likely,” her older sister said with asperity, reaching over to honk the horn herself. “Not with half of DeRenne County practically related to every Beaumont who ever lived here.”
 

“Just Beau,” the younger sister said. “Just Beau’s family will die out.”
 

Rachel was staring at the beautiful house, tempted to ask D’Arcy or Sissy to run inside and leave the envelope full of money. She couldn’t face Beaumont Tillson; that disaster she wanted to avoid at all costs.
 

“I’m going to see Eulie,” Sissy cried, sliding out of the driver’s seat. “See y’all later.”
 

D’Arcy gave a screech of aggravation. “Oh, shoot—we’ll never get to Charleston this way. Sissy, come back!” Then to Rachel, “Sissy always runs off to see Eulie the cook, they just love each other to death. It’s hard as hell to get her out of here when I want to leave.”
 

D’Arcy’s beautiful brows drew together in a scowl as she got out of the car. “Uh-oh, look who’s here,” she said under her breath. Her eyes were fixed on a mud-splashed dark green pickup truck ahead in the driveway. Just as abruptly she tossed her golden head in a gesture of disdain. “C’mon, Rachel honey, you might as well get a good look inside while we’re here. Not many people get a chance to see Clarissa’s Folly, but half of Charleston would give an arm and a leg for a peep. I’ll have to say this about Clarissa, while she was at it she did a good job.” They mounted the steps to an exquisite eighteenth century portico. “Too bad she didn’t stay with old Mr. Redneck Tillson long enough to spend all his money and finish up the house. I swear, Beau ought to have this place declared a state historical site, but he never does anything about it. Too busy raising cattle and trying to keep his head above water.
 

As they entered a dim hallway Rachel felt a rush of nostalgia for things ancient and beautiful; they matched her memories of the Goodbody mansion in Rittenhouse Square, built by her mother’s Quaker ancestors. Here was the same aura of elegant peace, of treasures protected for generations. The faint, airy scent of furniture wax, of wool and antique silk and linen and wood, of priceless hand-painted wallpaper and aging paint, was so evocative it was breathtaking. Bad as she felt—and she was trembling with nerves and fatigue—its beauty clutched at her.
 

D’Arcy tugged at her arm. “Just look in here.”
 

A paneled white door flung open revealed a formal parlor in pastel blue, gold, and white. The furnishings were eclectic, ranging from a Jacobean sideboard in oak holding Louis Quatorze gilt sconces and a collection of Staffordshire, to a pair of Sheraton chairs upholstered in faded sapphire velvet. “And in here,” D’Arcy said, opening sliding doors to reveal another room, “the library, but it’s really a study.”
 

The room was masculine in feel. Crossed eighteenth century military sabers hung over the superb Adam mantel in white-painted wood above the brick fireplace at one end. The opposite wall was filled with framed diplomas of preceding generations from Yale and Harvard and the Citadel, Charleston’s famous military college known as the West Point of the South.
 

The eighteenth century’s Age of Enlightenment’s reverence for balance and taste was reflected in age-mellowed rosewood wall paneling, and doors carved in a low relief of vines and trees. A handsome portrait of an early Carolina planter—perhaps a Beaumont ancestor in black satin. A Persian carpet with the rich red and deep blues of a true Hamadan covered that end of the room where a Victorian desk, incongruously enough, held an array of computer equipment.
 

“Beau works here,” the blond woman explained. “Look.” Her hand touched some invisible part of the wall’s paneling and it swung back to reveal a tiny room with an Adam bed and a sweep of silk canopy drawn to a gilt crown suspended over it. An extravagantly decorated Viennese commode held a china washbasin and pitcher.